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Mail merge is a feature of word processing that allows users to personalise letters with names and addresses from a database.
Mail Merge can be used to personalise pre-addressed envelopes or mailing labels for mass mailing from a form letter, a word processing document which contains fixed text.
Basically, mail merge makes it easy to send a lot of emails to a lot of people but give them a personalised touch.
Typically the data source is a spreadsheet or a database which has a field or column for each variable in the template.
When mail merge is run the word processing system creates an output document for each row in the database.
Mail merge has been in existence since the early word processors appeared on computers in 1980.
The following steps are required to do a mail merge; create a main document, create a data source, define the merge fields in the main document, merge the data with the main document, and save/export.