Mailing Lists Guidelines

ITS MONTHLY TALKIN' TECH

This Month's Topic: MANAGING MAILING LISTS AND MERGES

Click on any word in red to see more information on that topic!

Do you do a lot of mailings in your office? Are your mailing lists organized well for doing mail merges?
This month's topic will give you some guidelines for creating efficient mailing lists and review tips for doing a mail merge in Office XP. You may maintain a mailing list using:

An Excel spreadsheet

An Access database file

A Data Source within Word Mail Merge

A Query or Communications Management download from Colleague

Whichever method you choose, there are some basic guidelines to follow to create an efficient list.

START WITH A GOOD LIST!

You should use standard abbreviations (St, Ave, Rd) and directionals (N, S, W, E) as recommended by the Post Office with NO punctuation. Your list itself should not be in upper case, so that your merge letters will not look awkward. If you need to print mailing labels, you should change the format of all label data to UPPER CASE AFTER you merge to labels.

See the US Postal Service website for postal standards abbreviations and formatting.

ITS Staff can prepare your mailing list for you. See the Colleague: Job Requests web page for procedures and an email template for submitting your request.

Consult the Postal Service web site for additional information on address standards.

See our Mail Merge Talkin' Tech pages:

Preparing Mail Merge Documents

Mail Merge with Email

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