Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Office 2003 in 24 Hours

By Greg Perry

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Author
  • Acknowledgments
  • We Want to Hear from You!
  • Introduction
  • Who Should Read This Book?
  • What This Book Does for You
  • Can This Book Really Teach Office 2003 in 24 Hours?
  • Conventions Used in This Book
  • Part I. Working with Office 2003
  • Hour 1. Getting Acquainted with Office 2003
  • Part II. Processing with Word 2003
  • Hour 2. Welcome to Word 2003
  • Hour 3. Formatting with Word 2003
  • Hour 4. Managing Documents and Customizing Word 2003
  • Hour 5. Advanced Word 2003
    • Using Special Characters
    • Inserting Dates and Page Numbers
    • Inserting Pictures, Video Clips, and Sounds
    • Inserting Scanned and Digital Camera Images
    • To Do: Create and Use AutoText Entries
    • Adding Tables to Your Documents
    • Creating Multiple Columns
    • Creating Headers and Footers
    • Adding Footnotes and Endnotes
    • Introducing Mail Merge
    • Summary
    • Q&A
  • Part III. Computing with Excel 2003
  • Hour 6. Understanding Excel 2003 Workbooks
  • Hour 7. Restructuring and Editing Excel 2003 Worksheets
  • Hour 8. Using Excel 2003
  • Hour 9. Formatting Worksheets to Look Great
  • Hour 10. Charting with Excel 2003
  • Part IV. Presenting with Flair
  • Hour 11. PowerPoint 2003 Presentations
  • Hour 12. Editing and Arranging Your Presentations
  • Hour 13. PowerPoint 2003 Advanced Features
  • Hour 14. Animating Your Presentations
  • Part V. Organizing with Outlook 2003
  • Hour 15. Communicating with Outlook 2003
  • Hour 16. Planning and Scheduling with Outlook 2003
  • Part VI. Tracking with Access 2003
  • Hour 17. Access 2003 Basics
  • Hour 18. Entering and Displaying Access 2003 Data
  • Hour 19. Retrieving Your Data
  • Hour 20. Reporting with Access 2003
  • Part VII. Combining Office 2003 and the Internet
  • Hour 21. Office 2003 and the Internet
  • Hour 22. Creating Web Content with Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint
  • Part VIII. Publishing Eye-Catching Documents
  • Hour 23. Publishing with Flair Using Publisher 2003
  • Hour 24. Adding Art to Your Publications
  • Part IX. Appendixes
  • Appendix B. Business Contact Manager and Office Extras
  • Part X. Bonus Hours
  • Hour 25. Using FrontPage 2003 for Web Page Design and Creation
  • Hour 26. Managing Your Web with FrontPage

Introducing Mail Merge

Word provides many tools for those who want to mail personalized mail to family, friends, and customers. Although explaining all the ins and outs of Word's mail-merge techniques could fill an entire book, which could show how you to use other Office products such as Access to add to your mail-merge power, these 24 hours only give you time for a quick overview. Yet a quick overview is enough to get you started because Word makes things easy.

Preparing for Mail Merge

You must create a main document and locate or create a data source before you can accomplish mail merging with Word. The main document is a form letter, envelope, label, or some other document, large or small, that contains the formatted text that will be the same across the entire print run. In a way, the main document contains placeholders (called merge fields) for the data that changes, such as each customer who you're mailing to or each inventory part number that you're printing labels for.

The data source contains the data that changes between each item you print. Therefore, the data source might hold the customer names, addresses, and phone numbers, or perhaps the data source is your inventory file from which you'll pull data for your inventory labels.

Before you begin the actual mail-merge process, you use Word to create your main document, such as the form letter you want to send to clients. Now that you've worked through your first five hour lessons, that should be simple! Just don't include any name after your salutation and don't include an address for the recipient.

To Do: Step Through the Mail-Merge Process

Here is a quick run-through of the steps you'll take when you're ready to produce a mass mailing:

1. Open your main document.
2. Select Tools, Letters and Mailings, Mail Merge Wizard to open the Mail Merge task pane. Word asks you to select in the task pane the type of main document you're working on, such as letters or labels.
3. Select Letters and click Next at the bottom of the task pane.
4. Word then asks you to select the main document. You'll be using the currently open main document, so click Next to move to the next step.
5. Word now must know the data source you're going to use. One of the most obvious places to locate your contacts is Microsoft Outlook. Although you haven't yet mastered Outlook, if you've upgraded to Office 2003 from a previous version of Office, you might already have several names in your Outlook contacts list. Click the second option to select the data source from your Outlook contacts and then click Next to continue.

   Note

   You can enter new data into a new data source or click the Browse button to locate data from another source such as an Access database.

6. Word locates your data and allows you to sort the list or remove some from the list before you use that data source. Click Next to continue.
7. The Mail Merge task pane shown in Figure 5.11 is where you tell Word exactly where to insert each field from your data source. For example, if you want your letter to include the recipient's address, click where that information is to appear on each letter and then click the Address block section of your task pane.
   

   Figure 5.11 You must tell Word exactly where to place the data on each letter printed for the mass mailing.

8. Click Next to preview your letter. Word gives you the chance to step through each and every document that will print in the mailing if you want to see each one. If you run across one that you don't want to send, even though that person was in your data source, you have one final chance to exclude that recipient from this mailing.
9. Clicking Next completes the merge and the printing can begin.

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