What is the function of a mail merge?

Answer 1

Mailmerge is one of the most useful facilities offered by a Word Processor. It is the joining together of two sources of information into a single document, usually a list of names and a standard letter to whom a personalised copy of the letter must be sent. This is most commonly done in creating address labels or creating a form letter. Only certain details on the letter change, like having the same letter addressed to a number of different people.

You would create one copy of the letter and another file with a list of the data elements that need to be inserted into the letter. This saves having to separately type out a copy of each letter for each recipient, where every letter is almost identical. Each name or piece of data on the list is taken in turn and placed in the relevant position on a different copy of the letter. So if you had a letter that was being sent out to invite people for an interview, on the name of the person and the time of their interview would be different on the letter. If you were having 20 interviews or if you were having 150 interviews, the letter would only have to be typed up once. Take the following letter as a very simplistic example, which is inviting people to do an interview for a course:

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Dear ......,

We are writing to advise you that we would like to meet you on ...... at ..... to discuss your application for our ...... course.

Yours sincerely,

____________________

John Doe

Applications Manager

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The places where the ...... are indicate the only parts of the letter that would be different. All the rest of the text would be the same for every letter. They represent the name of the person, the date of their interview, the time of their interview and the name of the course they are applying for.

A list of those details would be created. For each person in turn a letter would be printed with the text above the same and the ...... replaced by the name of the person, the date of their interview, the time of their interview and the name of the course they are applying for.

Your list of people and details could be

John August 3rd 11am Accountancy

Mary August 3rd 11:30am Marketing

Tom August 4th 10am History

The letters you would get could be like this:

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Dear John,

We are writing to advise you that we would like to meet you on August 3rd at 11am to discuss your application for our Accountancy course.

Yours sincerely,

____________________

John Doe

Applications Manager

----

Dear Mary,

We are writing to advise you that we would like to meet you on August 3rd at 11:30am to discuss your application for our Marketing course.

Yours sincerely,

____________________

John Doe

Applications Manager

----

Dear Tom,

We are writing to advise you that we would like to meet you on August 4th at 10am to discuss your application for our History course.

Yours sincerely,

____________________

John Doe

Applications Manager

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By keeping the list of names, they could be used again when writing to those people, maybe to tell them if they got their place on the course. This is a very simple example. There would be much more detail to add, like the person's full address for example.

Large companies and organisations that are sending out letters to thousands of customers would use this kind of facility. Even if a similar letter had to go to a thousand people, the actual letter would only need to be typed once, leaving the gaps for details to be added, which would be got from their list of customers.

What you are seeing here is the purpose of mail merging, though not the full details of how it is done. That would vary from different word processors and even different versions of the same word processor. But for all of them the principle is the same, as is the reasons for using it.

Answer 2

The use of mail merge is so that is you intend to send many letters out to many different people, mail merge can automatically set different addresses in every copy that you print out. Each letter will contain the same main body but different addresses and salutations.

Answer 3

Imagine that you wish to send out a letter (i.e. mail) to many people and you have information about these people (such as their name and address) stored in a spreadsheet or a database or a text file or some other storage. In this scenario you could write many letters, manually writing the person's name and address each and every time or you could use mail merge.

Using mail merge you would only need to write one letter (a template) and then pull in the information automatically for each individual letter from the data source. If you have many letters to write (imagine if a business wanted to send out a standard letter to thousands of people) then the advantage of using mail merge is that it saves a lot of time and effort; which equates to saving money.

Answer 4

Mail merge is a function that allows a user to take a list of addresses that are in one format (such as a spreadsheet) and insert them, one at a time, into another document (such as a letter or other document in a word processor). Using the most common spreadsheet and word processing software: Microsoft Excel & Microsoft Word, complete the following steps to mail merge your documents. 1. In Excel, go to Tools -- Mail Merge 2. Select the type of document that you want to create in the word processor (e.g. Letter)) 3. Click "Get Data" 4. Select "Edit Main Document" 5. Select "Merge to New Document" 6. Save your document. Depending on your software and the edition, the instructions may vary slightly. Use the "help" menu if needed!

Answer 5

When you want to send the same letter to lots of different people

Answer 6

generates the same document to multiple addresses