Create personalized email messages

- [Instructor] This document is named Email Message Content and it is in chapter three of the exercise files. You can start with any document you wish that you might want to send as an email message and personalize for each of the recipients. If you're responsible for correspondents for your team or significant portion of your organization, and you haven't used this feature before, you're in for a real treat. This is very similar to what we did with our Mail Merge Letters and everything that we learned about how to merge letters using Word is going to work here for us just the same way. So we will start by clicking on Mailings, Start Mail Merge, and this time we will choose Email Messages. And as soon as we do, it looks more like an email message than like a letter which is pretty cool. We're going to replace the highlighted text with fields but first, in order to get some merge fields, we need to connect to a data source. Choose Select Recipients, let's Use an Existing List, and the list that I'm going to use which we will also find in the exercise files chapter three, is simply called Requests. And this is a workbook with only one sheet and we'll pop it open. I always like to double-check and make sure my recipients got here, yup here they are, here's Michelle and Nehru and Pearl and Rafael, that'll work just fine. I should also make sure that I have an email field though 'cause I'm sending emails, yes I have email fields, that'll work well. Now remember there's also a good practice to choose Match Field and make sure that our first name, last name, email address are all connected as we would expect them to be and we can remember this set of matches if we wish, don't necessarily need to. Now let's add fields to our email message. First, dear first name, remember that we have a greeting line that we can use here instead. So Greeting Line, Dear, and we're going to use Dear First Name, Dear Joshua, and let's say leave it blank if we don't have a name. Flip through and make sure, Dear Michelle, Dear Nehru, Dear Pearl, yup that's what I want. Here we have first name again, going to delete this, we're going to insert just a Merge Field. We don't want dear, we just want first name. This is an email message, not a letter, it's a little less formal in tone, you'll want to make sure that the content is what you're looking for and the tone is appropriate to an email message. If I wished, I could save this right now, first I'm going to preview it, flip through some of my folks That looks good, check my spelling and grammar, that works as well. And if Microsoft Outlook isn't running, this would be a good time to start it, it's also a good time to close other applications that we don't need to have running besides Word and Outlook. You may recall that when we merged directly to print documents, that our merge just went directly to the printer. And we had to make sure ahead of time that we loaded the paper we wanted because the printer was not going to wait for us. When we send email messages, it really works exactly the same way, as soon as I send them, they're going to go and it will go right to my Outbox and from there they'll be scooped out and sent and a copy will be placed in my Sent Items folder. That's not necessarily what I wish to have happen, I'd like to be able to look at one of my messages and make sure that it's going to work. But there's no way that I can merge emails to a document. So how do we solve this issue, how do we slow down the merge long enough that I can take a look at it? I'll show you in the next movie.