- How to do a mail merge in word for mac from excel how to#
- How to do a mail merge in word for mac from excel mac os x#
Once you’ve clicked on “ OK” in that superfluous and confusing dialog box (which you have to go through each and every time you open your Word letter to edit it, by the way, even if you haven’t made any changes to your worksheet/workbook/document/whatever), the way to insert specific fields into your Word letter is… to drag and drop palette buttons (in the “ Merge Field” section)! Argh. What on earth is this supposed to mean? What is a workbook? What is a worksheet? What is a document? What is a sheet? But then when you open an Excel document with the Data Merge Manager, it asks you to “ open document in workbook“.
How to do a mail merge in word for mac from excel mac os x#
In the normal Mac OS X interface, each file is a document.
Then there is of course the issue of terminology. “ Sheet1” is the one that’s selected by default, and is of course the one where the secretary has put all her data, but imagine the confusion generated by this extra step, which is totally unnecessary. Then she wants to create a mail merge and is asked which sheet she wants! Of course, the sheets still have their generic numbered name, so there is absolutely no indication of what the sheet contains. Imagine the average secretary, who doesn’t even have any idea that Excel puts three blank sheets in each Excel document that she creates. And even if you leave “ Sheet2” and “ Sheet3” totally empty, as I am sure most people do, when the time comes to get the data from Word, Word has to be told that the data is in “ Sheet1“! Why does it have to ask this? Because for some reason, by default, every new Excel document contains three worksheets called, appropriately enough, “ Sheet1“, “ Sheet2” and “ Sheet3“. What does Word ask me to do? It asks me to select the sheet that contains my data! Then I click on the “ Get Data” button in the “ Data Source” section of the palette to create a link to the Excel worksheet. There’s nothing chronological about a palette, yet that’s exactly how the Data Merge Manager palette is designed. Compare this to the Formatting Palette, where each section corresponds to a particular category of formatting. Each section of the palette corresponds to one step in the process. It’s actually some kind of “wizard” that supposedly guides you through the process of creating a mail merge type of letter. This palette is an entirely different beast. In the Mac world, palettes are normally used to access formatting options that affect the current selection. This “palette” is effectively a UI monster. For one thing, the entire thing is managed through a palette that is opened by going to the “ Tools” menu and selecting “ Data Merge Manager“.
How to do a mail merge in word for mac from excel how to#
It’s fairly easy to see why people are intimidated by this kind of feature and reluctant to learn how to use it unless they absolutely have to. So here I am with a letter typed in Word and an Excel worksheet containing a list of addresses to be inserted into the letter in Word in order to print a mass mailing. Not being a secretary myself, I don’t often use this kind of feature (mail merge), but I have to help out people who need it.