Creating an email mail-merge from an Excel file (Windows PC) What is mail-merge? Mail merge is a tool in Microsoft Word that allows you to send out batches of personalised email messages. Instead of sending out a generic identical email to all recipients, personalised data is pulled from another file, in this case an Excel spreadsheet, to create personalised email messages.

Steps for creating the merge

• Set up the Excel spreadsheet.

o For flexibility, each piece of information must be held in its own column in Excel (e.g. address would be split into Address 1, Address 2, City, County and Postcode columns)

o Each column must have a unique, easily identifiable column header.

Start the mail merge in Word

• Open Microsoft Word.

• Click on the Mailings tab.

• Click on the Start Mail Merge icon.

• Click on Step by Step Mail Merge Wizard. The Mail Merge pane will appear at the right of the screen.

Specify that you require an email mail-merge

• In the Mail Merge wizard pane, click to select E-mail messages.

• At the bottom of the Mail Merge wizard pane, click on Next: Starting document.

Choose your starting document You will build the body of your email message in Word.

• In the Mail Merge wizard pane choose whether you want to:

o Use the current document – i.e. type the body of the email message in the blank Word document

o Start from a template – i.e. You will browse to find an existing Word template to pre-populate the body of the email message.

o Start from existing document – i.e. You will browse to find an existing Word document to pre-populate the body of the email message.

• At the bottom of the Mail Merge wizard pane, click on Next: Select recipients.

Link to the Excel spreadsheet

• In the Mail Merge wizard, choose Use an existing list.

• Click on Browse.

• Navigate the Excel list containing your mail merge data and click Open.

• Confirm which sheet in your Excel sheet contains the mail merge data and click OK.

For a video on how to use Word to perform an email mail-merge, visit https://staff.brighton.ac.uk/is/training and click on the Word icon.

Choose your recipients

• Deselect the tick boxes to exclude certain recipients from the mail merge

• Click on the drop-down arrow on a column to filter to only include recipients that match certain criteria

• Click OK.

• At the bottom of the Mail Merge wizard pane, click on Next: Write your email message

Write the body of the email message

• In the Word document, type the content of your email message (excluding the message title and the To field).

Whenever you want to pull personalised text from the Excel file:

• In the Mail Merge wizard pane on the right, click on More Items.

• The pop-up window will give you

a menu of the columns in your Excel file to choose from.

• Click on the column you want to pull in and then click on Insert and then Close.

• The field will appear in your Word document surrounded by <<>>

• You can Set up a rule to add conditional text if required.

• At the bottom of the Mail Merge wizard pane, click on Next: Preview your email messages

Preview the individual email messages When writing the body text, mail merge fields will appear as <<fieldname>> The preview allows you to show how this will look with the real data pulled in from the Excel file.

• To flick through the recipients to see how the email text changes, in the Mail Merge wizard

click on the arrow key.

• If you need to edit the text, at the bottom of the Mail Merge wizard pane, click on Previous: Write your email message

• When you are happy with the preview of your messages, at the bottom of the Mail Merge wizard pane, click on Next: Complete the merge

Send the emails

• In the Mail Merge wizard pane, click on Electronic Mail.

• In the To field, check that the correct field is selected. This should be the column header of the column containing the email addresses in your Excel sheet.

• In the Subject line field, type the subject of the email.

• If you have a very large recipient list and want to send the emails in smaller batches, click on the From radio button and specify which recipients you want to process in the boxes, as shown above (the settings above would send the first 500 emails). You would then need click on the Electronic Mail icon again to send the next batch (e.g. from 501 to 1000)

• Click OK to send the emails.

• The emails will appear in the Sent items folder of your personal mailbox. It is not possible to perform the mail merge using a functional (shared) mailbox.

Opening an existing mail-merge Word document If you open a Word document containing a mail-merge linked to an Excel file, you will see the following message:

This is asking if you still want to link to the same Excel file for your mail-merge list.

• If you do want to use the same list, click Yes. If your Excel list has changed, these changes will be pulled into your mail merge. This means that you can set up a frequently used mail-merge in Word and simply update the supporting Excel sheet for new mail-merges using the same email body text.

• If you do not want to use the same list, click on No. You will need to specify a new list on the Select recipients step of the Mail Merge wizard.

How to show the Mail Merge wizard on an existing mail merge document

• Click on the Mailings tab.

• Click on the Start Mail Merge icon.

• Click on Step by Step Mail Merge Wizard.

Set up a rule to add conditional text When writing the text of your email, you can add text that is conditional upon the content of one of the columns in your Excel file. eg if a column in your Excel file specifies whether someone is a member of a pension scheme or not, like the example on the right, you could set the mail merge to print one paragraph on the emails sent to those in the pension scheme, and a different paragraph to those who are not.

• When writing the body of the email message, before previewing the individual mail messages, on the Mailings tab on the ribbon click on Rules.

• Click on If… Then… Else

• In the field name, choose the column header of the column containing the data for the rule (in the example above, it is the Pension_scheme column that says whether someone is in a pension scheme or not.

• In the Compare to field, specify what should be checked for. Eg in our example, we are checking for the text “LGPS” in the Pension Scheme column, as this indicates that someone is in the pension scheme.

• In the Insert this text box, type the text that should appear if someone meets the rule’s criteria. Eg in the example above, if someone has LGPS in the Pension Scheme column.

• In the Otherwise insert this text box, type the text that should appear if someone does not meet the rule’s criteria. You can leave this blank.

• Click OK. You can see the results when previewing the individual emails.