Mail Merge

There are times when many Excel gurus will need to send an email to a list of recipients.  For instance, you may wish to send a Word document to everyone in your unit, your department, or even your entire company.  Now, I’m not talking about sending Spam, mind you, just legitimate communication that needs to be sent to a comparatively large number of email recipients.

You can, of course, accomplish this by manually entering each of the receiver’s address, but who wants to do that?!?

Another way is use to create a custom Contact Group using the innate abilities of Outlook.  This may be an acceptable course of action, especially if you have a fairly limited and stable number of addressees.

The fact is, of course, that lists of this sort are often kept in good old Excel.  They are regularly stored and updated in worksheets that are maintained in individual units and/or corporate human resource departments.

To make use of this information, save your Excel workbook to My Data Sources on your hard drive, open your Word doc and do the following:

1.    Click on the Mailings tab

2.    From the Start Mail Merge group, choose Start Mail Merge/E-Mail Messages

3.    Click on Select Recipients and choose Use an Existing List

4.    Finally, double-click on the Excel workbook housing your mailing list and finish

That’s really all there is to it.  It may, of course, take a few brief minutes of experimentation to become comfortable with this technique,.  I can assure you, however, you will be hooked once you use this procedure even once.  Mail Merge – Give it a try!