Suppose you have to send out lots of
invitations to a party. LOTS of invitations-we're talking in the region of 40 or so here. Now, you want to use your spiffy new computer to do all this, but you
can't be assed to retype all the names forty times, all the addresses forty times...nightmare.
So instead of tediously reentering things, you do a mail merge.
A mail merge is where you take
mailing information and
merge it into a letter, making a personalised set of letters. For example, a typical, barebones, unmerged mail merge letter would look something like this:
<<Address1>>
<<Town>>
<<County>>
<<Postcode>>
Dear <<FirstName>>
We would be delighted if you and your wife <<SpousesName>> would attend our get together at our house on Saturday 15th June. BYOB!
Yours sincerely,
Joe J. Baldwin
Now, that doesn't look like much, does it? So you would enter all the FirstName, Address1 etc data into a
database (actually your word processor pretending to be a database) then do the
merge.
Hey presto, you get 40
letters, ready to be printed, with all of the addresses and names put in place. When this is done, instead of the
mangled mess of
quasi-HTML above, you would have:
1 Spiffy Way
Niceton
Bucks
FU6 2NY
Dear Jeff
We would be delighted if you and your wife Carolina would attend our get together at our house on Saturday 15th June. BYOB!
Yours sincerely,
Joe J. Baldwin
And much more in that vein. Mail merge is in most popular
word processors, such as
Microsoft Word (and also
Publisher. I also found (after a poke in the right direction by
wertperch that it is indeed possible to use Outlook as a mail merge source-see http://www.ibiztips.com/email25JUN01.htm),
OpenOffice.org and
KWord (in KWords case, you have to use an
actual database, instead of a WP internal one). Good thing too, as a mail merge is a semi-required project in
GCSE IT.