Suppose that you need to send to each of your employees a letter or e-mail message containing personal tax withholding and salary information.

Creating each letter, e-mail message, or envelope 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 text in Goals and About this course, or look at the table of contents. Then click Next to start the first lesson.

To do the practice sessions for this course, you'll also need to have Microsoft Office Excel 2007 installed on your computer.

If you're familiar with the mail merges and the Mail Merge Wizard, see the next course, Mail merge II: Use the Ribbon and perform a complex mail merge, to learn how to use the Mailings tab on the Ribbon to create a mail merge.