5/10/10
9:45 am

MacMost Now 396: Using Mail Merge in Pages

You can use the Mail Merge feature in iWork Pages to print envelopes, letters or any document that uses different names and addresses on each page. You can get the data from your Address Book or from a Numbers spreadsheet.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now and today's episode let's look at mail merge in Pages. So one of the things computers have done for more than half a century is the mail merge. This is where you take a list of names and addresses and you can use a program like a word processor to print out either envelopes with one name and address on each envelope, or letters replacing the name as beginning of the letter with one of the names from the list. So you can have one letter and then printout say thousands of copies of it, each one with its own heading with a different name in it. So you can do this in iWork Pages as well. Let me show you how. So when we run Pages, we're given the template chooser, and we can choose a blank document, but in this case, let's start using letters or envelopes. Starting with envelopes, we'll just pick a traditional envelope here, choose it, and then we get to see this simple envelope document with some sample text in there. Now, we wanted to print out, say a whole bunch of envelopes based on a list, we would do that using the edit mail merge option. Then it asks us to choose a source. There's two different sources you can choose. Either your address book or a numbers document. So if you choose your address book obviously, you'd be using addresses that are in your address book. Let's try that. Now we can merge this to a new document so we create a new document where each page hass a different address, or we can simply send it directly to the printer. Well as you can choose to substitute the closest match here, so for instance use a work address if a home address is missing, things like that that you can play around with. So let's check off merge and we'll see we're going to get a document here with five Pages and the first one's going to have an address near its a sample address included with address book for apple and then we've got some other addresses that are in there. It's a sample address book. I don't have complete addresses so we're just putting in names there. Now we could instead do a mail merge using a numbers document. I've got a numbers document right here, if you can see, I've just put three names in it and I've labeled the fields pretty clearly at the top last name, first name, etc. So I'm gonna use that instead. So I'll do edit, mail merge and I'll choose numbers document. It will ask me to select the numbers document so I'm gonna do so. And there it is. And it's gonna come up with this list of fields here and what it should map to. So, what I wanna do is map say the street to the field name's street, its looking for one column called work street. So I wanna note that for later on that I can actually call a field work street and it will be able to grab it right away. But I can map work state to state, work zip to zip and when I have nothing else that's a red here on the right then I have a complete set of data. I choose merge, merges into a new document. So how does Pages know where to substitute each thing like a name? Well if I select it and then I go to View and I select Show Inspector, I can go to the links section of the inspector which is second from the right here. There's hyperlink, bookmark and merge. And I select merge. And I can see that here the first name is this merge field here with its targeted first name. I can choose the last name, title things like that so if I wanna get rid of this title 1, I can simple select that, delete it. I can also map things to different fields here in the document before I even go to the mail merge function. So I can create my own mail merge document by starting a blank document here, and let's say I just type some text and where it says name, I'm going to substitute the name, so I'm going to select it and with the Inspector open and set to the Link Inspector merge, I'm going to add plus at a merge field and I'm gonna set the merge field name goes to target First Name. So now I've create my own document that has merges in it. I can then go to Edit Mail Merge, select that same numbers document and now I can merge it And I'll get three Pages here each one with the first names substituted for the word name. So you see you can actually use mail merge for more than just envelopes and letters. You can have any document you want and substitute any number of fields from a number spreadsheet to create multiple versions of that document and different Pages. So for instance if I was printing an evaluations either for say students in a class or workers in a workplace I could print out different ones with the name and evaluation scores from a numbers database into a letter format and will print out a different page for each person with their correct name matching the scores. And probably a ton of other uses as well. So hope you found this useful till next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 41 Responses to “MacMost Now 396: Using Mail Merge in Pages”

forkboy1965

14 years ago

I tried to use my new iMac for generating mailing labels for Christmas cards this Christmas past. No can do. Mail Merge does documents and envelopes, but not mailing labels (as does Microsoft Word, which does a ton of labels).

While Pages has lots of interesting other features the lack of such a basic feature seems rather unforgivable to me. It has made migrating to an all-Mac world a bit more difficult.

Oddly enough the entire experience brought about another complain I have that isn't necessarily Apple specific. When using one's contact or address book (be it on a Mac or some Windows application) I often have a Mr. & Mrs. in their own cards because it's the only way to track their individual phone numbers and birthdays. This, of course, presents problems when using mail merge as I wind up with two items (envelopes, letters, etc.) for one household.

I really wish Apple (and all other address book/contacts) application writers would do something about this.

patrick3d

14 years ago

I had so many problems with Pages that I tried various workarounds to run MS Office apps on my iMac. What worked was Office for the Mac. It lets me do label printing, and more importantly lets me work on saved Word and Excel documents without screwing up the formatting as did Pages and Numbers. I recommend Office for the Mac over the Apple apps.

Comments: 41 Responses to “MacMost Now 396: Using Mail Merge in Pages”

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