Say you have several letters you want to do in WORD and your list of contacts is in Access. Here are the instructions to create one document with all the letters but you input numbers into Access to specify which letter will be used.

Create new field in Access where you will put numbers in it. Each number will represent a letter. What I would do is put the number after the name of each WORD letter so you can keep track of what the number of the letter is. I have them  saved separated out and then I put them all in one document. So you have your query ready that includes the number field.

Now click the “External Data” tab and click “Word Merge”. Instead of saying link to existing document, choose, link to new document. This is going to take some programming. Before you insert a field, click CTRL+F9. Then you can go to the “Mailings” tab and choose “Insert Merge Field”. If you want to insert the date, click CTRL+F9 then type In between the brackets (don’t include quotes) “{DATE\@ “MMMM d, yyyy”}”.

The following address line will eliminate blank lines if the address2 field is blank.

{MERGEFIELD ClientName}
{MERGEFIELD Add2} {If{MERGEFIELD Add2}=”” “” “{MERGEFIELD Add2”}
}{MERGEFIELD City}, {MERGEFIELD State} {MERGEFIELD Zip}

Dear {MERGEFIELD JoinSal}    

{If{MERGEIELD name of your number field}= “1” “Thank you for participating in the…….         here you type the first letter and if you need to insert any other fields, just include the CTRL+F9. DO NOT PUT A END QUOTE UNTIL THE VERY END OF THE LETTER.

{MERGEFIELD Signature}” {
}If{MERGEFIELD name of your number field)= “2” “Thank you for making a donation to honor…..     here you type your second letter. Do this for every letter. DO NOT PUT A SPACE BETWEEN LETTERS.

{MERGEFIELD Signature}”

NOW, in your query, type the number of the letter you want to use for each person, in the number field. Close the query. Open the WORD document and it’ll ask you Opening this document will run the following…just say YES. When it opens, click “Mailings” tab then “Finish & Merge” then “Edit Individual Documents”.

Happy Merging!

Written by: Rana Kory