Learn to set up mail merge in Word with an Excel data source to send personalized invitations. The tutorial covers inserting placeholders for guest name, website, and seating section, mapping columns, filtering recipients, and sending emails through Outlook with formatting intact.
Chapters
Hi everyone, and welcome to a very special edition of Ask Evan here with Maria. Today we're going to answer a question from one of our readers, Anil. Anil says, "Dear Evan, I regularly get your newsletter and enjoy the great content. Can you give a demo of how you do the mail merge to send out newsletters, please?" Unfortunately, Evan has switched from Outlook to Gmail, therefore I will be doing the demo with you today. However, to make things a little bit more interesting, instead of doing a newsletter, we're gonna do a mail merge for my website party. So what you'll need is a Word document, an Excel document, and obviously Outlook to send your mail merge. So the first thing I'm gonna do is show you my invitation. Which is my Word document, and I'm gonna read it for you and show you where we're gonna place the placeholders, which is gonna be found in our Excel document. Sorry about that. So it says dear and is blank. So we're gonna place the first placeholder here. You are cordially invited to Maria's website party. Once you arrive at the party, you will receive, receive a name tag which will indicate your website. So here's gonna be the second placeholder. Once you receive your name tag, please be seated in section blank. So here we're gonna place the third placeholder. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. I'm looking forward to seeing you soon. Cheers, Maria. So what I'm gonna do now is show you my Excel document, which has our 4 placeholders. I know in the Word document I only said there was 3, but you always need to add an extra placeholder, which is gonna be the email address which you're sending to the recipients receiving your mail merge. So the first placeholder is gonna be my guest, then it's the second one is website, and then the third is the section where my guests are gonna be seated. So once you have your Excel document ready, you're gonna save it to a place where you're not gonna forget. You're gonna need this right away, so you're gonna save it and close it. If you don't close it, it's not gonna work properly. Then we're gonna go to our Word document and we're gonna open Tools and go to Mail Merge Manager. I know for some of you that have Windows instead of Mac, it may look a little bit different, but if you follow the steps, you will have a successful mail merge, I promise. So the first step we're gonna do is, um, click Create New. And since I already clicked on this before, you're gonna click on Form Letters. Step 2 is you're gonna get your list, and the list is your Excel list. So you're gonna open data source and go to Party Invitation— that's the name of my Excel document— and click OK. Here it's gonna ask you which sheet you want to use because you can have multiple sheets in Excel document. Choose the correct sheet and you want the entire worksheet cell range. So you're gonna click OK and then we're gonna go to step 3 where the 4 placeholders are shown. So now what I'm gonna do is make sure my spacing is correct because once you send a mail merge to, I don't know, 50, 100, 1,000 people, you want it to look really nice. So I'm gonna make sure my spacing is well, and I'm gonna add in the guest information here. I'm gonna add in their website information here, and lastly, their seat section. Also, just a quick note here, when you're making your Excel document, make sure you give each section of your placeholders a precise name. For example, I could have named guest whatever, but it would have been harder for me to know which placeholder to place where, depending on how many placeholders you're going to be using when you send your mail merge. So once I've put in my 3 placeholders, I'm gonna go to step 4. And also remember, we're gonna ignore step, uh, placeholder number 4, which is the email address. So number 4 is you have a filter option here. If let's say you have a party and you invited 50 people and you're only sure about 40, the other 10 you can click options and make sure that you keep them out of the mail merge. The next option is the preview results. This is my favorite. If you click on the ABC button or view merge data, you can actually see all your placeholders. So it doesn't just show the title, it shows the actual information and then you can go through each of your recipients and make sure that the spacing is correct, name is spelled correct, the correct website, etc. If you're happy with that, you're gonna go to the last step and complete merge. So you're gonna click on the button that says Generate Email Messages, and here is where we're gonna place our fourth and very last placeholder email. Because you wanted to email them. You're gonna put a subject, "My website pretty." And here you have an option to send as text, attachment, or HTML message. I usually prefer to send it as an HTML message because I have pictures and banners in my signature and I want people to see it. But if you don't prefer pictures to be shown, you can always send it as a text. So I'm gonna choose HTML message here, and then you're gonna click on Mail Merge to Outbox. So pretend you clicked on that. If you go to your outbox and click on your sent items, you will see your list is slowly starting to build up, and all the recipients on your list will be receiving the email. So once you're finished, you can close this, and your recipients will have their email. And, um, I hope you guys enjoyed the video and I hope it was very simple. If you have any questions, please, please, please feel free to comment below and I will respond to you as soon as I can. Thanks, guys!
