Addressing Letters and Envelopes Using Your Contacts List
Word and Outlook can work together with varying degrees of success to help you generate properly addressed letters and envelopes. Outlook's Actions menu, in fact, includes a New Letter to Contact choice that ostensibly does exactly that. What it actually does, however, is kick off Word's Letter Wizard—an option that always works better when started from within Word. We don't recommend that you select this option from Outlook; instead, always start with Word when you want to create a letter or envelope with the Letter Wizard.
→ For full details on the only effective way to use Word's Letter Wizard, see "Creating and Editing Letters".
You can, however, kick off a Word mail merge from Outlook. This process can be surprisingly effective, especially if you're willing to create a custom view and filter your Contacts list first. Start by opening the Contacts folder, and then select View, Current View, Define Views. Click the New button and define a Table or Card view that contains all the fields you need for your merge. For example, if you're planning to mail letters to customers, be sure the list of fields includes Title, First Name, Last Name, Suffix, and all the Business Address fields. Don't use the Full Name or Mailing Address fields, which might contain home addresses or names that are formatted incorrectly. Save the view with a name such as Business Mail Merge.
→ For instructions on how to create a new view, see "Creating a New Custom View".
If you want to send the mailing to a subset of your list, select the individual items manually, using Ctrl+click, or select View, Current View, Customize Current View and define a filter.
→ For details on how to create a filter in Outlook, see "Customizing an Existing View".
Select Tools, Mail Merge. The Mail Merge Contacts dialog box opens, as shown in Figure 12.7.
Figure 12.7. Use these options, combined with a custom Outlook view, to quickly create a Word mail merge document.
Tip from 
You can merge using the entire list of fields from the Contacts folder. If you do that, however, the list of merge fields will include all 140-something fields from Outlook, and scrolling through the list will be a chore. Trust us—creating a custom view will save you a lot of time.
From the Document File section, choose whether you want to use a New Document or an Existing Document. Use the Browse button to select a file. If you want, you can pause here, create your document in Word, save it and close it, and return to the dialog box to continue.
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Using an existing document is a great way to print custom envelopes easily, using a return address of your choosing. Run this mail merge routine and create an envelope that contains the First Name, Last Name, and appropriate Business Address fields. Add a text box containing your return address (with a logo, if you want), and save the file using a name such as My Business Envelope.doc. The next time you want to create an envelope, select one or more items from your Contacts folder, and use Outlook's mail merge features with the document you just created. The results are nearly foolproof—and you can use the same technique for letters as well, producing much better results than the Letter Wizard.
In the Contact Data File section, check the Permanent File box if you want to save the filtered data from your Contacts folder in a separate file for reuse later. If you've defined a custom view, this step is not necessary; it's most applicable if you want to share the data file with another Word user who doesn't have access to your Contacts folder.
Select a Document Type from the Merge Options section of the dialog box; normally, you'll use the Form Letters option, but you can also select Mailing Labels, Envelopes, or Catalog. These options are the same as those available using Word's Mail Merge Wizard. Select one of three Merge To destinations as well: a new document, the printer, or e-mail.
→ For more details about how to use Word's mail merge capabilities, see Chapter 20, "Merging Data and Documents".