Mailing Labels, Emails and Faxes using Microsoft Outlook Contacts

The Holiday Season includes sending out invitations, Christmas Cards, Greetings etc to your friends and customers. Mail-Merge can be a real time saver whether you use the postal service, faxes or emails.

Here are some resources to get you started.

In case you are not sure what mail merge is:

Mail-Merge takes one letter (or email) that you have written and creates personalized copies for everyone you want to send it to i.e. each person's copy will have their own name and any other details that you want written into the appropriate places.

How will you be reaching out to your friends this year ?

1. The Really Old Fashioned Way: Real Cards and Letters in Real Envelopes

Even if you will be sending paper based mail this year, technology can help you.

Here are step-by-step instructions to:

Use mail-merge in Word with Outlook data to create and print personalized letters

Use mail-merge in Word with Outlook data to print mailing labels and envelopes.

2. The Slightly Old Fashioned Way: Faxing

Despite what many people will have you believe, Faxing is not dead.

In fact in terms of deliverability, it can beat email - there is almost no chance that your fax won't get delivered because of an over-zealous spam filter.

You can use Microsoft Word and the free fax printer that comes with Windows 2000/XP/Vista to send out personalized faxes to your customers this year.

The Bad News: Windows Fax and MS Word don't talk easily to each other out of the box.
The Good News: Fax4Word allows you to fax merge straight from Word to the Windows Fax printer.

3. The New Way: Emailing

Out-of-the-box Outlook uses Word to carry out its Mail Merge. Here is a link to a tutorial to do this..

You may also want to take a look at Outlook addon software like eMailMerge 4Outlook.

It takes all the complexity out of doing email merges and replaces it with a simple Wizard ... plus it has powerful features that get around many built-in limitations of Outlook and Word ... plus you can use data from Excel files, Access databases etc.