8.5 Mail merge
You can send two hundred personalised letters, labels or certificates from one file.
Before:07. Word — CoreUnlocks:13. Portfolio & Certification
Mail merge turns one letter and one spreadsheet into two hundred personalised letters, labels or certificates, and this topic covers the whole pipeline: a clean Excel data source, merge fields, conditional text, previewing and the final merge. It sits in the long-documents module because the data half depends on Excel habits from earlier. Nearly every mail merge problem is really a data problem — a missing header, a stray blank row — and the common confusion is hunting through the letter for what only the spreadsheet can explain.
Work through these
Data source in Excel: one row per recipient, clean headers
The merge reads one row per recipient from a spreadsheet, and clean single-row headers are what make the fields appear correctly. Most merge problems are data problems.
Merge fields, rules and conditional text
Fields insert each recipient's values, and rules let text appear only for some of them. That conditional part is what makes a merge feel personal rather than mechanical.
Previewing, checking for errors, and merging to document or print
Previewing individual records and checking for errors before merging catches the mistakes that would otherwise be printed two hundred times. Merging to a document first is the safer order.
Labels, envelopes and certificates
The same mechanism produces labels, envelopes and certificates, each with its own layout considerations. Recognising them as one feature saves learning three things.
Practice files
- wd-03-mailmerge-letter.docx
A letter template with placeholders marked, ready for merge fields.
- wd-03-mailmerge-recipients.xlsx
Twenty-five fictional recipients as a clean mail-merge data source.
Opens in Word. Every name, number and address in these files is made up. No account needed to download.
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Links last checked 29 Aug 2026.
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