The latter is better so you aren’t dealing with extraneous information you don’t need, and will also speed up the mail merge process in Part 3 below. Also, you can use all the contact fields or just the fields that are in the current view. This part is pretty simple, but notice the window that opens has a bunch of choices you can make including whether to show all the contacts being viewed, or just the contacts you selected in the Outlook view window. Click OK to initialize and start MS Word.click the Mail Merge button in the ribbon toolbar which opens a new window Mail Merge Contacts.Part 2: In Outlook, start the mail merge procedure: Once you can see in Outlook the data set of contacts you’re going to use, You’re now ready for part 2. Click the Columns option and deselect and select the fields you want to display.With the view selected in Outlook, repeat step 2 above, then choose to modify the view.You are best off starting with the fewest fields needed in your view, since having a lot of information will slow down the mail merge process as Word will have to read all that data into memory. At this point you should adjust the view if you want to see more or fewer fields of information on those contacts. You may have to click the Current View drop-down in the ribbon bar to see it.Īt this point you should be looking at a list of your contacts – only the ones that match the category you selected. Now switch to the new view you just created.
Click OK 4 more times to close all the windows that opened in the above steps, which puts you back at the main Outlook window showing you your contacts. On the filter window that opens, click the More Choices tab and click the Categories button.On the next screen, choose Conditional Formatting, then click the Add button, name the condition (such as “Holiday”) and click the Condition button.On the window that opens, create a new View, name it and choose the Table view type.Click open the Current View drop-down in the ribbon and select Manage Views.
That will open Word with the correct contacts loaded and ready for you to complete the third part and follow Word’s Mail Merge procedure. Second, kick off the Mail Merge from within Outlook. , What you’ll have to do is your mail merge operation in three parts: First, sort your contacts folder in Outlook and apply a filter so you only see the category of contacts that you want to use. And the correct procedure entails a number of steps to go through and multiple windows that open. Unfortunately, filtering by categories wasn’t included in the Word Mail Merge wizard for your Outlook Contacts. Using the Mail Merge function in Word doesn’t show me a way to filter contacts by category. What I’d like to do is a mail merge in Word using just one category of contacts (I’m making a holiday letter). I have all my contacts organized by category. I use Office 365 and have Outlook and Word 2016 installed. Word 2016 Mail Merge – Categories: a reader asks…