Sending Christmas cards: How to address bulk letters using Excel and Word

 

Sending Christmas cards: How to address bulk letters using Excel and Word

One joyful part of the holiday season for me is sending out Christmas cards. I learned that many people find sending them out a bit overwhelming, so I thought I’d share my strategy for addressing bulk letters using Excel and Word. (Note that if after reading this you decide to give it a try and get stuck on a step, please feel free to reach out to me and I’d be happy to help.)

First step is to create your list of people and addresses you want to include. I recommend creating an Excel spreadsheet* using the following fields:

• Nickname**
• Address1
• Address2
• City
• State
• Postal Code

*I like to use Excel on OneDrive (Using the Cloud allows you to access your document anywhere, which makes adding updates to it throughout the year easy). If you haven’t used Excel much before, one tip is to highlight the fields when you’re done and press “Ctrl T” to make a table.

**Nickname is the first and last name of the person or family at the address. (e.g. “Marissa and David Twitchell”) On my own personal addresses spreadsheet I also have additional columns for the first and last names of people at the address.

Note that people may move or separate or remarry over time, so I also include a field like “Last Updated” to help me track when I’ve last updated the address. Then each year before I sent out Christmas letters, I can reach out to the families I think may have moved and confirm their address.

Okay, let’s say you have gathered the addresses of the people you want to send letters to. Now how do you get them on address labels?

Open a blank document in Word. Click the “Mailings” tab at the top and click “Start Mail Merge” and select the option for the “Step-by-step mail merge wizard”. On the radio button select “Labels” then next, then for the document layout choose “8460 Address Labels” under the Avery US Letter labels. Then on the recipients panel click browse and navigate to your address label excel spreadsheet.

On the “Arrange your labels” step, click “Address block” (and you may also need to match fields). Click “Update labels” and then under “Finish and merge” select “Edit individual documents”.

I noticed that the formatting for the labels was a little weird until I did “Ctrl A” right click and select “Paragraph” and then change the default format spacing to 0 pt Before, 0 pt After, and Single Line spacing:

And then you have lovely address labels that you can print onto the sticker pull and peel address labels. Good luck!