People are more likely to open and read a personalized letter, publication, or e-mail as opposed to a broadly addressed correspondence such as "To Whom It May Concern". Because of presumed time constraints, business tolerates such impersonalized communications. Word provides the capability of creating form letters, envelopes, labels, and e-mails to generate mass mailings with personalized details in a quick and easy method. What makes Mail Merge in Word 2007 different from earlier versions is that you now have two different methods of merging documents with data sources. For those of you who felt comfortable using the mail merge technique in earlier versions of Word, the Mail Merge task pane wizard still exists. Using this method, Word runs a wizard in a task pane that guides you through a six step process until the merge is complete. The final step of the wizard allows you to merge directly to a printer or a new document. I always recommend merging to a new document so you can make any editing or formatting changes to the document before you print or e-mail it. The second method is a new one which utilizes the Ribbon on the Mailings Tab. Personally, I feel that this method really simplifies the whole process.   The Mailings tab provides buttons arranged in groups that you use to complete the process. You simply start with selecting the appropriate buttons in the Start Mail Merge group, continue by pressing the appropriate buttons in the Write & Insert Fields group, preview the results, and finish the merge. The work flow using the Mailings ribbon is left-to-right.   Some general guidelines in planning your mail merge project include the following:       1.  Identify or create your main document (letter, e-mail, etc.)       2.  Create or identify your data source (Excel, Access, Outlook Contact Folder, etc.)       3.  Know which fields from your data source needs to be merged into the main document (Name, Address, City,             State, Zip, etc.)       4.  Know your distribution method                a. Envelopes (size)                b. Labels (Manufacturer & Type)                c.  E-mail If you mail merge using e-mail, Word creates a separate mailing where each recipient is the sole recipient of each message, unlike sending an e-mail to a distribution list or hiding recipients in the Bcc line of the message. Thus the recipient sees only themselves as the recipient. This also increases the ability for messages to penetrate spam filters.   Please contact Cindy Prindle if you have any questions about our Mail Merge classes or Sarah Loeffelholz if you would like to register for this class. You can contact us by e-mail at cprindle@habco.com, or sloeffelholz@habco.com, or by phone at (608) 784-7737.  You can also check our calendar and register for any of our in-house and on-line classes on our website at www.habco.com, (point to The Training Center on the menu bar).  We welcome the opportunity to provide you, our client, the competitive edge by helping the employees of your organization become more efficient with your software.