Getting ready to do your holiday card mailings? Preparing to send invitations to your next big event? I show you how to do a label mail merge with Outlook and Word by using your Outlook Categories.


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Video Transcription

Now this tip is going to be about how to do a mail merge with specific outlook contacts to labels or letters, but this particular demo is going to be about labels. And I have been wanting to do this each and every year about this time in October and have it ready for November, so people know how to create their labels for their holiday cards. I am doing this specifically for those getting ready to do their holiday card mailings but obviously this feature is available for whenever you want to create labels for whatever group of contacts that you have. Now what I do is, if your contacts in your Outlook no matter what Outlook folder you have them in, it could even be a public folders, if you want a exchange server and you have public folder contacts, this same process is exactly the same for each and every place that Outlook contacts are at not just for the default Outlook contact folder, so keep that in mind. I am in my Outlook contact folder because that is what this demo is based on and let us just say I want to send a holiday cards to my Board of Directors, let us say I got my board of directors already categorized, so if in fact you got 465 contacts in my contact folder but only four of them I want to do mailing labels for, I want to make sure that I got them categorized properly, so I can go to the category view in Outlook, my category view, and because I am going to by category view is if I am in my contacts I can see the views already on this side as well by category. It has been really been available and all versions of Outlook, I happen to be doing this in Outlook 2007 but if you do not have Outlook 2007, yet that is okay, you can still use this. I am going to select my contacts, so at the top one, hold my shift key down, select the bottom one and select all the ones in between. Now this would be if I wanted to just send do labels for the Board of directors. If I am doing this for my holiday card list and I have all of the contacts in my contact folder given a category of holiday cards, then I would go the holiday cards category and use that category to select, if you happen to be wanting to send it to everybody in your contact list, you do not need the category, all you need to do is go to your contacts folder and then you are going to go up to the tools menu and you are going to say mail merge. Now what is really important here is that, your version of Outlook and your version of Word are the same version. So you cannot do mail merging like this if you got Outlook 2007 and Word 2003 or a Word 2007 and Outlook 2003, this does not work. They have to be of the same version that is really important. So I got some choices right up here, only select the contacts or all contacts in current view, so if you are going to do this mail merge process for everybody in your contact folder, you would say all contact in current view, but I am specifying certain contacts, these are the board of directors, it could be your holiday card group, holiday card category, whatever it is you want to do. So only – the contacts I want to keep that. New documents, this third area of contact data file, do not worry about that. Merge options I am going to change that from formatters to mailing labels. Merge to new document that is what I want to do, new document so I am going to say, okay. It is going to launch Word 2007, if you did not have the same version of Word as Outlook at this time you get an error. Now it is telling me Outlook created a mail merge document and prepared your contact data for you. To complete the set up for mailing labels, press the set up button in section one of the mail merge helper dialogue. So this is telling you what you need to do next, so I am going to say okay, here I am mail merge helper, section one set up button that is what that little message told me to do. I am going to say set up, and this where you select the mailing labels that you have, a very common one is Avery 5160, that is a very common mailing label but you would need to find the mail label type that you are using and select that in this list, it has a to