
^ "Early" magazine articles about Multimate's Mail Merge were largely 1988-1990". I have watched WordPerfect evolve from the ancient MS-DOS. I was introduced to Wordperfect DOS when I bought my first computer in college. WordStar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer mail merge 2-2 MailMerge not a new feature, and this is 2nd Ed, (C) 1982 "WordStar Training Guide (2ed Feb83) (C) 1982" (PDF). the result is that each row (or record) in the data source. ^ "Frequently asked questions about the mail merge feature in Word". 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. It is often used for variable data printing. The templated letter says "Dear ", and when executed, the mail merge creates a letter for each record in the database, so it appears the letter is more personal. Merging the data with the main document.Ī common usage is for creating "personalized" letters, where a template is created, with a field for "Given Name", for example. Defining the merge fields in the main document. Creating a main document and the template. The mail merging process generally requires the following steps:
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. The data source is typically a spreadsheet or a database which has a field or column for each variable in the template. Going beyond words, in 2018 The New York Times detailed a further instance of "mass customization" - personalized videos. Ī paperless approach is to use mail merge to format email.
EMAIL MERGE FROM WORD CODE
Money can be saved by pre-sorting on zip code and grouping by postal-discount requirements (same ZIP code, same SCF). WordPerfect also offered this capacity for CP/M and MS-DOS systems Microsoft Word added it later on, Īs did Multimate. WordStar was perhaps the earliest to provide this, originally via an ancillary program called Mail merge. Mail merge dates back to early word processors on personal computers, circa 1980.