Mail merge is a feature that is common in a lot of office suites as it is one of the most important marketing tools a business is able to use. Writing promotional letters can be a good way to attract more attention to your business. You’re able to contact your current customers and inform them about changes or new promotions that will get them back into your store and spending their money. However, for the best effect, you need to customize each letter so that it feels personal rather than just a marketing ploy. Mail merge helps to achieve this.
By using this feature, you’re able to insert many different customer details into every single letter. You can add their name, address and other information you have on record into it so it feels more personal. If you were doing this manually it would take you a long time but with Open Office, it really only takes a few minutes. You’ll then have many different letters which can just be printed off straight away with no other hassle involved. In this article, we’re going to show you how you can use mail merge to achieve this.
The first thing you need to do is actually design the letter you’re going to send out. You need to use Writer to do this. Write it exactly how you want it to be and don’t worry about inserting customer information manually, we’ll be able to do that a bit later. Once you have it prepared, we need a data source which will have all of the data we need to insert into the letter. You can use any of the office tools to do this, we recommend either creating a spreadsheet or a database for this job. You may already have this ready, if so that’s great. Let’s move on to the next stage.
Now that we have our data source, it’s time to actually register it into our letter. This is very easy to do, just open up the letter in Writer again and then go to File –> Wizards –> Address Data Source. From here, it should give you many different options about how your data is stored. If you’ve followed our recommendations, you need to select “Other external data source”. After you’ve done that, you’ll need to click on “Settings” and then locate the actual file itself so it can then be processed. Make sure you’ve done everything right so far. Towards the end, there will be something called “Field assignment” which you may need to use.
You should now have a data source which you’ll be able to use. Now it’s time to do exactly that, let’s insert some data from the source! Go to View –> Data Sources. You should have named the source you registered earlier and now you should be able to select it from the list. You should now be able to drag the headings from the data into the letter itself which will allow you to insert placeholders which is where the data will be placed. The last thing to do after this is to actually print off the letters. You can do this right now by going to File –> Print and then selecting the different letters you want to print.
In conclusion, you should now have a good understanding on how to use mail merge in the suite. If you still are unsure about how to do it, keep referring back to our article and you should be able to get it used and once you know what to do, you’ll be able to do it time and time again with no issues at all. What we offer is a great office suite that many people use everyday and when you see great features like this being available, it should make you wonder why you aren’t using it already. We highly recommended downloading Open Office.
Tags: mail merge, open office, writer