Suppose that you need to send to each of your employees a letter or e-mail message containing personal tax withholding and salary information. Or, say you're offering some merchandise at half-price to your customers and you want to mail out numbered coupons so that you can track the response rate.

Creating each letter, e-mail message, or coupon individually would take hours. That's where mail merge comes in. Using mail merge, all you have to do is create one document that contains the information that is the same in each copy, and add some placeholders for the information that is unique to each copy. Word takes care of the rest.

To learn more about this course, read the overview in the center of this page or the table of contents in the left column. Then click Next to start the first lesson.

To do the practice sessions for this course, you'll need to have Microsoft Office Excel 2003 installed on your computer.