Use mail merge

If you wanted to create a bunch of recipient address labels, you could type them all manually in an empty label document like this.

But there is a much better way, and it's called Mail Merge.

I'll show you it works.

Click the MAILINGS tab, and click Start Mail Merge, and Labels.

You start by selecting your label options.

We'll just use the same labels from the first movie, and click OK.

Word adds blank labels to a new document. To see the labels, click the TABLE TOOLS LAYOUT tab, and click View Gridlines.

Next, we need to add addresses to the labels, and we'll do that by creating a recipient list.

Go back to the MAILINGS tab, click Select Recipients, and Type a New List.

Click a box under the header row and start typing. To save time, you can press Tab to move right or Shift+Tab to move left.

Fill in as much information as you want, and click New Entry to add the next recipient.

You can add as many recipients as you want, and change the list at any time.

When you are finished, click OK. Enter a name for the list and Save it.

So, now we have our blank labels and a list of names to add to them.

The last thing we need to do is decide how we want the recipient addresses to look on to these labels.

And the easiest way to do that is to add an Address Block.

In this first section, you choose how you want the name to appear. Let's select a less formal format.

When you select an option over here, you can see a preview over here of how it will look when applied to the names in your list.

Click these arrows to move through the entries.

Next, you can decide whether you want to Insert company name, and when to include the country or region.

This last option modifies the address format according to the country or region.

For example, Word formats the postal code differently for this address in France.

When you are finished setting up the address block, return the preview to the first entry, and click OK.

And the block is added to the first label. To add it to all the labels, click Update Labels.

Now if you want to see what the actual labels look like instead of the mail merge code, click Preview Results.

So why did we go to all the trouble to create a list instead of typing the addresses directly in the labels?

Because when we set up our next mail merge project, all we have to do is click Select Recipients, and we can use the list again. No retyping.

You'll see how that works in Movie 4. You can also use your Outlook contacts.

So now our labels are ready to print. Or are they? Actually, many of the addresses are cut off and we also want to add a small logo.

Up next, we'll fix all that by formatting the labels and adding a graphic.