Mail merge - Wikipedia Mail merge This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. ( Learn how and when to remove these template messages ) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia 's notability guidelines for products and services. Please help to establish notability by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond its mere trivial mention. If notability can not be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources : `` Mail merge '' -- news newspapers books scholar JSTOR ( January 2016 ) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( January 2017 ) This article is written like a manual or guidebook. Please help rewrite this article from a descriptive, neutral point of view, and remove advice or instruction. ( December 2017 ) Mail merge is a process to create personalized letters and pre-addressed envelopes or mailing labels for mass mailings from a form letter. The feature is usually employed in a word processing document which contains fixed text ( which is the same in each output document ) and variables ( which act as placeholders that are replaced by text from the data source ). The feature dates back to early word processors on personal computers, circa 1980. WordStar was perhaps the earliest to provide this, originally via an ancillary program called Mail merge. WordPerfect also offered this capacity for CP / M and MS - DOS systems, and Microsoft Word added it later on. The data source is typically a spreadsheet or a database which has a field or column for each variable in the template. When the mail merge process is run, the word processing system creates an output document for each row in the database, using the fixed text exactly as it appears. Overview The mail merging process generally requires the following steps : Creating a Main Document or and the Template. Creating a Data Source. Defining the Merge Fields in the main document. Merging the Data with the main document. Saving / Exporting. A common usage is for creating `` personalized '' letters, where a template is created, with a field for `` Given Name '', for example. The templated letter says `` Dear < Given Name > '', and when executed, the mail merge creates a letter for each record in the database, so it appears the letter is more personal. It is often used for variable data printing. It can also be used to create address labels from a customer relationship management database, or for mass emails with pertinent information in them, perhaps a username and password. See also Desktop publishing Digital printing Dynamic publishing Mass customization Word processors References Jump up ^ `` Cambridge Dictionary Online ''. Retrieved 14 May 2016. Jump up ^ `` WordStar MailMerge ''. Retrieved 20 May 2016. External links Mail merge with Openoffice.org Mail merge with Microsoft Word Video tutorial on how to Mail merge using Microsoft Excel and Word Video demo on how to data / mail merge using a 3rd party tool Retrieved from `` https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mail_merge&oldid=826820975 '' Categories : Text editor features Word processors Hidden categories : Articles with topics of unclear notability from January 2016 All articles with topics of unclear notability Articles needing additional references from January 2017 All articles needing additional references Wikipedia articles needing style editing from December 2017 All articles needing style editing Articles with multiple maintenance issues Talk About Wikipedia Deutsch Gaeilge 한국어 Nederlands Polski Edit links This page was last edited on 21 February 2018, at 05 : 08. About Wikipedia

Question: what is the purpose of mail merge in ms word
Answer: a process to create personalized letters and pre-addressed envelopes or mailing labels for mass mailings from a form letter