mailmergeMost probably have a love hate relationship with mail merge.  This complicated yet refined method for  automating letter and envelope creation can relieve you of many hours of tedious copy and pasting from Excel to Word.  No longer do you need to manually enter names and addresses on the thank you letters you plan to send out to your 1,500 most loyal customers.  However, mail merge can also lead to hours of printer frustration and hair pulling if you do not play by the rules of mail merge.

Here are a few tips for a less painful mail merge (if merging a list of contacts from Excel to letters and envelopes in Word for example):

  1. ONLY use the ‘Finish & Merge/Print Documents…’ option for printing! This can not be stressed enough.  Many folks have pulled their hair out trying to get the regular ‘File/Print’ option to work with mail merge, so don’t waste your time.  Sometimes it may work, but not for all things, so just go with the mail merge print options.
  2. mm-printMake use of the ‘Print records From ___ To ___’ print option.  If you have hundreds of documents to print on expensive paper, you do not want to be wasting time and paper when your setup is incorrect.  Start by printing the first 6 records. Make sure you do not choice to print ALL.  This print option also allows you to potentially split a print job between two different printers (you could send items 1 to 100 to one printer and 101 to 200 to another printer.
  3. Again, preview the print job on the first handful of items.  If the mail merge is setup for both envelopes and letters this can help to ensure your printer is happy with switching between letters and envelopes at the same time.  This also just a good quality assurance test and helps prevent a good deal of printer waste.
  4. Lock your printer or print job.  If you are printing in a large office on a shared network printer, you do not want others inserting a print job in the middle of you large mail merge job.  One option is to locking your print job until you get to the printer and enter your username and password.  This is good if you have confidential documents that you do not want others to see and allows you to only execute the print job after you physically reach the printer.A secondary solution, and a better one when trying to prevent your large print jobs from being interrupted by others, is to talk with you IT staff about setting up a temporary password lock on the printer.   This essentially locks the printer so only you can send jobs to it.  Once your jobs are complete you would then remove the password block so others could print.  If you lock others out, place a notice on the printer to alert others of who has locked the printer and for how long (this is just a common courtesy to others in your work space).  The more communication the better.