word making mailing labels from excel tutorial for beginners

in this video I want to show you how to make U mailing labels out of your Excel data and actually what we do is we use Microsoft Words mail merch technology so let's say you have uh your list in Excel and it would be really important that your first row contains your field names like this this this particular spreadsheet and then each row after that has a different person's name each column is a different field so this would be the best format that you should use uh if your data is in Microsoft Excel and you want to make mailing labels out of that all right so notice that the first TR contains your field names I'm going to close out of Excel and actually we're going to go into Microsoft Word okay so here we are in Microsoft Word and what happens is you're going to pick on mailings under mailings uh you would think that it's right over here where it says labels but actually that allows you to make um the same label as you know the whole sheet out of the the same label if you want to have different labels you're going to do a mail merge so let's pick on start mail merge and you're going to make either letters emails envelopes or labels of course we're going to do labels then uh at this point it wants you to pick the label size what I really like about this feature is that the a the Avery labels that you can purchase at Office Max or Staples are built right right in now there's other vendors here okay but quite frankly the only ones I've ever used are the Avery labels you're going to pick on Avery us letter uh Microsoft apparently has labels too but I don't use those I use the Avery us letter and and these are generally available at like Office Max or Staples or something like that now if you notice over here you have the product number so these are standard Avery sizes and a really popular size is called 5160 this is a standard address label so let's pick that all right and we'll click on okay and notice how the the page looks uh like your mailing labels now so that was the first step the second step is who do you want to send it to the select recipients so we're going to click on that pull down we're still under the mailings tab by the way uh now you can type a new list but you probably already have the existing list either in Axis or Excel so if it's either in Axis or Excel you would pick on useing existing list which is what we're going to do notice how you can also make your labels from Microsoft Outlook so we're going to pick on use an existing list then you're going to point to your Excel spreadsheet on your computer uh now Windows Explorer is going to come up so you want to make sure you pick the proper uh folder within Windows Explorer mine happened to be in the my documents folder so I picked on documents I'm going to scroll down and that notice how there's Excel spreadsheets there's access databases and uh even different types of data here but let's go back to that one I was just looking at it was called leads so let me scroll down a bit all right so here is going to be leads of the Excel spreadsheet let's go ahead and double click on that now it's asking you which sheet within that workbook has the actual data now I only have one sheet in my workbook but if there's more than one they'd be listed here so you pick the proper sheet now here's a really important choice the first it says the first row of data contains the column headers I showed you that ours did so I'm going to check that that that's a really important one we're going to click on okay that's where word is also going to get the field names from we'll click on okay now um so we picked on U start mail merge and we did labels you pick on select recipients and you picked if you're going to say uh Excel or axis you'll say use an existing list otherwise you can make a away from Outlook now if you did not want to send the labels to everybody then you would say edit recipient list then you can actually pick and choose uh if you uncheck those then they would not get the label okay so you can actually pick and choose from this list if you wanted to send it to everybody just click on okay here and you really wouldn't even have to go into that screen but if you wanted to pick and choose the people you would pick on edit recipient list now you could do the fields one by one you see where it says insert merge field those are the actual fields from the Excel spreadsheet you could do this one by one but let me show you a quicker way when you're building labels you're going to use something that's called the address block the address block already has the name address city state and Z built right in uh when you do this you want you really should come over here and pick on Match Fields because Microsoft work word might be calling the field something different than Microsoft Excel is calling the fields let's see if it found matches word is looking for a first name field and in Excel it was called a first name uh it found the last name field it found an address we don't have an address too but that's okay uh it found a city state and zip so you would want to make sure that it found the fields in the Excel spreadsheet otherwise you would click on the pull down and these are the fields from the Excel spreadsheet and you would you would find the matching field okay in this case it it found good matches for that we'll click on okay so the way we got to that was a match Fields we're going to click on okay uh that was called the address block now here's something you really have to do it only put the address Block in the first label make sure you pick on update labels then notice how the address block is in all of the labels it's a really important step otherwise you'll just have that first label then basically we're done we're going to pick on run preview results and just like that you just built your labels out of your Microsoft Excel data now at this point um if there's more than one page we can we can skim through the different pages if you wanted to print that you would turn preview mode off and then come over here just pick on finish and merge we're going to say edit individual documents you click on okay and now there's your labels all right now ready to print so um the mail merge technology in Microsoft Word is how we do our mailings um or our mailing labels from an Excel spreadsheet