Question

How do I individually insert my contacts from Access into a letter?

Asked by: jjr16

I am using MS Office 2000.  I have a list of names, addresses, etc. in an Access table and I want to insert each contact one at a time in a certain location on a letter (before the body of the message) and have them be formatted as I want (like have the Street column be on one line and the City, State, and Zip all on the next line).
Another way to say that is that I have a list of my contacts in Access and I want to mail an automatically personalized letter to each of them (so I don't have to manually type 250+ names and address now and later).
I know this is possible to do, I just haven't figured out how to do it yet....  Thank you for your help.

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Asked On
2003-11-25 at 11:23:53ID20808427
Topic

Microsoft Office Suite

Participating Experts
1
Points
175
Comments
6

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Answers

 

by: DreamboatPosted on 2003-11-25 at 12:24:30ID: 9820275

It's called mail merge.
You'll find it in Word, under the Tools menu.

It's a cinch.
See www.theofficeexperts.com/word.htm and click on Mail merge to see how it's *usually* done.
Come back and let me know if you have any questions or problems---I wrote those instructions.

 

by: jjr16Posted on 2003-11-26 at 15:22:03ID: 9828514

OK.  That looks like what I want to do.  I won't be able to try it out for about a week or so, but I'll let you know when I get it working (and especially if not)....

 

by: DreamboatPosted on 2003-11-26 at 15:43:25ID: 9828598

LOL!
You'll get it working.
It's pretty easy, tho I hate mail merging in XP.
I think the earlier versions' mail merge helpers were easier.

 

by: jjr16Posted on 2003-12-21 at 17:30:38ID: 9982815

Well, I still haven't had the chance to try it out yet.  The reason being is that I don't actually have MS Office on my machine.  I am helping someone else with this and I typed up the data on my machine in a spreadsheet with OpenOffice.org 1.1 and I'm going to import it to the person I'm helping's computer.

But my second question(s) is:
I have columns for "First Name," "Last Name," "Address," and so on.  When I had two people listed for the same address and they had the same last name I put like "John and Jane" in the First Name column.  A few of the names that are at the same address have different last names, which is a problem for when I want to put all the info together for use as a mailing address and have only one row for each address.  The only thing I could think of was to make a new column for the second person and insert it in the resulting merged document between the first person (First Name next to Last Name on first row) and the address (third and fourth row).  Now what I'm wondering is, will that be the best way to go about it and if so am I going to have to put up with a blank line in between the first person(s) and the address?

Oh! On second thought, I guess it would work to do two separate mail merges.  I would do it once for all the normal addresses and exclude those with the new column/different last names, and do the reverse on the second time.  The difference would be that I would have three rows for the address in the first merged document and four for the second. Now the new question is: Is there an option to exclude rows if they have info in a certain column?

 

by: DreamboatPosted on 2003-12-21 at 18:05:37ID: 9982904

It should automatically NOT show a blank line for those that DON'T have data.

 

by: jjr16Posted on 2003-12-22 at 12:24:48ID: 9987225

Alright, sounds good.  Thanks.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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