Don’t let the table fool you: mail merge labels
Hi, my name is Roxanne Kenison, and I'm a member of the team that publishes Help content about Word. You can get to this content by pressing the F1 key in Word, and also by going to the Help and How To page for Word 2007 on the Office Online site.
My team publishes new and updated content every month, based on what's hot, what's new, or what appears to be causing confusion with Word 2007. Because Word 2007 has a lot about it that's new (new UI, new file format), much of our efforts have gone into publishing content that addresses these areas. But there are some areas in Word that people need help with perennially, every version. One of these is mail merge.
Writing instructions for mail merge is a bit like writing instructions for a craft project, where you need to start out by telling the reader all the items they need to assemble before they even begin working on the project. Along the way, you need to place signposts to keep the reader on track. Mail merge is complex. But, when people get it, they're thrilled that Word has such powerful capabilities. We find that our mail merge content is particularly appreciated at holiday time, when businesses and families alike send out those ubiquitous holiday newsletters.
We recently published a series of demos that show how to do mail merge with labels. We have found demos to be a very popular type of content on our site--maybe it's easier to see something in action than it is to read about it. Still, videos are indeed a linear format. If you have a specific question about some detailed aspect of the mail merge process, you may not want to watch a whole video, let alone a series of them.
For example, the demos that show how to create mail merged labels walk through the whole process, end to end. But something that I think is especially confusing with mail merge labels is how Word uses a table to create the layout, and you have to remember to use the Update Label command to make all the cells update.
Here's how this works:
You've begun the merge, having selected the data source and the labels you want to work with. You add the Address Block to the first label. Your document looks like this:
Now, you must click Update Labels to populate all the labels with the content of the first label (<<AddressBlock>> is added to each label):
Clicking Preview Results shows you the data on each label (Of course, this is a pretend mailing list!):
To view each entry, you click the forward arrow in the Preview Results group of the Mailings tab (tool tip label is Next Record).
Because Word is using a table to lay out the sheet of labels, clicking Next Record can be an odd experience. Word uses the top left label to display the "current" record, and this can give you the wrong impression that something screwy is happening to how the sheet of labels will be printed. The preview here is a preview of the data, not of the sheet of labels. To really see what the sheet of labels is going to look like, go to the Finish & Merge button, and then click Edit Individual Documents. This will copy the data into a standalone document (no longer linked to the data source), and you can preview it as you would any Word doc.
Oh, and if you're using a Tablet PC and the Update Labels command doesn't seem to be working, you may be experiencing a problem that's documented in this KB article.
I hope this takes the mystery out of mail merge labels for you. If you watch the demos, be sure to leave feedback with the "Was this information helpful?" buttons. My team uses this feedback to gauge what further content to publish on Office Online.
