Word 2016 Mail Merge

This course takes a deep dive into mail merge within Word 2016. Mail merge is a powerful function to batch process personalized letters or emails as well as create mailing labels and envelopes. The hosts take extra time to explain the different types of data sources that can be used, how to create letters and emails, how to add images to envelopes and labels, and apply rules to extend the capabilities of the mail merge process. This series is specifically for locally installed Word 2016 on Windows operating system.

[MUSIC] [SOUND] Hello, everyone, and welcome to your Word 2016 Mail Merge series. I'm your host Vonne Smith. And in this course overview, we're gonna be going over exactly what is in this particular series. What is the target audience, or I guess I should say who is the target audience for this show? Any prerequisites that we need to know about and any extra tidbits that I might have for you. So in this particular show, we're going to be covering mail merge. This is a deep dive into this particular concept and function inward that is very popular and very powerful to be able to automate, creating things like letters and labels and envelopes and emails. So we're going to spend some time and really get into the nitty-gritty of mail merge. These are episodes that are present in the Word 2016 advanced series. So if you're like, hm, I've seen these before, you are correct. But this is where we really explain our data sources, like getting into our file types and understanding those data connections in a really very specific sense. So you have a very good understanding, and you will be very confident in how to perform mail merges. But we do start as an introduction, kinda going down the list and up and back around. But really there's only one topic, it's mail merge, and we're gonna be covering all the different facets of itm, including some kind of fun stuff that you can do with some rules at the end. So who should be watching this series? Anybody that wants to understand mail merge and its entirety, so I would say Word and Office users, Office with a capital O, meaning that it is for Office 365. We will be working within that particular account, so you will need to have access to other products within this suite such as Excel and Outlook. And like I said, this will be a deep dive into this particular functionality of Word. And talking about those other software components that you're going to need, you will need to have a foundational knowledge of Word 2016 and Excel and Outlook, because we’re going to be using those particular programs within this series. And I just realized I have a big typo here in this particular slide, is that I have a Mac OS basics. Let's go ahead and clarify this. This is PC, this is for Windows operating system. This is not for a Mac operating system. So I do apologize about that. You can tell I do it for both platforms, and I forgot to go ahead and proofread my slides. So, hey, you know what? We'll turn this into a teachable moment to always look at those things. Double-check your work before you record a video on it. But we will need to understand how to format text, a little bit of information about graphical elements, page layouts, so those things, it is going to have some assumed knowledge in this show. You also gonna need a little bit of experience working with Excel, like how to enter in data? Understandings and file formats, which we do talk about in our data sources like our CSV file format and our text delimited or tab delimited text files that you can use as export file formats from an Excel starting point. Also some very fundamental concepts about using database programs such as Access, we won't get very deep into it but we will explain it. Then understanding how to use Outlook. That there are things called contacts in Outlook, that you understand some basic emailing concepts of your inbox and your sent mail and maybe a little bit about servers. We of course have shows on all of these particular pieces of software in its entirety. So definitely check out our library and see about working with those particular programs before you get into mail merge. So a little bit of foundational assumed knowledge going on there. We do have exercise files and episode notes associated with every single episode within this particular series, they are attached to them, so definitely look for that. All of the files are available in one folder or one zip folder here in this overview, so definitely check that out. And if anything's missing or something not right, just contact us, let us know. I need to make sure that I've got the right files associated with the right episodes, so let us know if you find anything slightly awry. On that same note with this particular series, in the exercise files, you're going to get warnings on pretty much all of the files that are associated with this particular show because I am making database connections to files as like a starting point. So you’re going to get a warning that’s saying that the link is broken because that link is still trying to find it on my desktop here on my computer. When you open it up, it can't find that, so it's going to give you those warnings. And it'll probably say something about enable editing because it's going to the Internet, and that's really with all of our exercise files for the most part. So I wanted to put this into the overview to let you know that this will happen. So you will need to relink the data source connection to that particular file, like I don't know what you're talking about. Definitely checkout our episode that is called Data Sources, and the one episode is the Existing Lists. And there's two other episodes that are for troubleshooting where we talked specifically about missing data sources and how to reestablish that data connection. So check those out if you need a little bit more information about it before getting started. And then lastly, like I said before, go ahead and review our other courses in our library on Excel and Word and Outlook. Check them out, check all of them out while you're there, and just go ahead and update yourself on some of those basic concepts, [LAUGH] there's always other options. Okay, I present one way. In mail merge it's maybe a little bit more limited, but there's always another way that you can do things in any Microsoft products. Updates do happen. So if you are watching a version of Word that might have like an extra button that my Word in this particular show does not have, it could be because there was a Office 365 updates, and they're always going ahead and adding on those features and incremental updates. You can also go into your help menu and check for updates to see if you have any updates available for you. Searching for the answers, right? The Internet is a great treasure trove of information, so there's probably other ways to do things. So I definitely encourage you to go out and search for answers that you might have about particular topics. Everybody has different reasons of why they use different products, so the examples that I'm giving are my own personal experience. And hopefully you can be able to correlate that into the way that you need to use this product, or maybe not use this particular function because it maybe is not applicable to how you do things in your workflow. So, biggest thing, have fun. I like to have fun. We like to joke. And just try to make learning about this information fun because if you can understand and learn the concepts, hopefully it'll make it a little bit more fun in your daily life and it won't seem so daunting. So, I look forward to seeing you in future episodes. [SOUND]