ACCESS MAIL MERGE

Hello Felice

Thank you for your question.

First it might be a good idea to extract the details of the people you are going to be sending the email to (e.g. using a query), if the email is only going to a select group of people from a particular table in your database.

The query should at least each person's first name and email address, i.e. these pieces of information should be stored in your database if you are going to do an email merge from them.

I suggest doing a practice run of the following using just 2 or 3 names just to test the following process out before you send the 'proper' email.

Assuming you are using Outlook, Outlook should be set so that it uses Word as the E-mail editor. To do this:

1.Select Tools and click Options
2.Click the Mail Format tab
3.Tick Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to edit e-mail messages

So now to merge the data in the database to the e-mails do the following:

1.Open a new blank e-mail or template
2.In the body of the message you need to write something (eg Dear). This the sets up the merge options.
3.In the Tools menu select Letters and Mailings and the Mail Merge. The mail merge bar appears on the right.
4.Select E-Mail messages and click Next
5.Select Use the current document and click Next
6.Select Use an existing list and click Browse.
7.The Select Data Source dialog box appears. Find and select the relevant database. Select the query or table which contains the details of the people you are sending the email to.
8.The mail merge recipient list appears. Make sure all the intended recipients are selected. Click OK.
9.Click Next
10.In Step 4 Select More items
11.The Insert Merge Field dialog box appears. Select the first name field to go next to Dear. Click Cancel to close the dialog box
12.Finish the letter using any other merge fields if required. Click Next
13.Preview the e-mails. Click Next.
14.Click Electronic Mail. The Merge To E-mail dialog box appears.
15.In the To box enter the e-mail field (if not already there). Enter the Subject and select All
16.Click OK

The system will immediately send all the merged e-mails to the relevant recipients. The names won’t appear in the e-mail window but you will see a copy of every e-mail in the Sent folder.

I hope this helps.

Kind regards
Amanda