[ Team LiB ] Using Contacts for Mail Merge Mail merge is possibly the most popular reason for accessing Outlook data from Word. Mail merge makes it easy to create address labels, personalized letters, and address books. You can start mail merges from either Outlook or Word, and a number of options are available to you for configuring the mail merge. By opening Word and using the Tools, Letters and Mailings, Mail Merge menu selection to begin the merge, you limit the number of contact fields available for use as merge fields to common mail fields. When you start the. | Team LiB Using Contacts for Mail Merge Mail merge is possibly the most popular reason for accessing Outlook data from Word. Mail merge makes it easy to create address labels personalized letters and address books. You can start mail merges from either Outlook or Word and a number of options are available to you for configuring the mail merge. By opening Word and using the Tools Letters and Mailings Mail Merge menu selection to begin the merge you limit the number of contact fields available for use as merge fields to common mail fields. When you start the merge from Outlook it makes all contact fields available to use in the merge although you have the option to include only the fields used in the current view. Beginning the merge from Outlook also enables you to select a group of contacts to use in the merge instead of filtering your contacts using the basic filtering options available from the Mail Merge dialog in Word. Regardless of how you begin the mail merge you can change the merge type or fields used at any time. To avoid the security prompt in Outlook you ll want to merge to HTML-formatted messages. Task Start a Mail Merge from Outlook When you begin your mail merge from Outlook you can use its filtering capabilities to select the contacts you want to include in your merge. Use custom views or Find to filter your contacts and then select the contacts you want to include in the merge. After the contacts are filtered or selected you re ready to create your mail merge 1. Select the contacts you re going to merge and choose Tools Mail Merge. This opens the Mail Merge Contacts dialog as shown in Figure . Figure . Selecting the contacts to use in Outlook often results in faster merging in Word because the mail merge data file contains only the contacts you re using in your merge. 2. If you selected a group of contacts before choosing mail merge Only Selected Contacts is enabled. Choose All Contacts in Current View if you created a filtered view .
