Most users will be completely satisfied with the built-in label and envelope reports in DONATION. See the sections on Mailing Labels and Envelopes for more details on these reports.
However, in some limited cases you may want to generate your own mailing labels or envelopes, perhaps because you want different information included on them, you want to use a size of mailing labels or envelopes that isn't supported by the above reports, or you want to use a different font.
One way to do that is to export the desired data from DONATION, then do your own mail merge in your word processor. See Exporting Data from the Program to learn your options for exporting data. For this purpose, the best option is to export to Excel. (If you use Letters ⇒ Mass Mailing to do the export, which is one of the options in that Exporting topic, it exports to a CSV file, but then gives you an option to open that in Excel. From Excel, you can re-save it as a regular Excel file.)
The following mail merging instructions work for Word 2010 or later. The same type of actions may be possible with WordPerfect or other word processing programs, but truthfully, we just haven't tried them.
Microsoft actually has an online article and video about creating mailing labels using Word, with your data coming from an Excel spreadsheet (or various other sources), at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/print-labels-for-your-mailing-list-276a2cd1-74d2-43d0-ab5a-b90460358ad5. It may make more sense to follow its instructions than the ones in the rest of this help topic.
Word for Office 365, Word 2019, Word 2016, Word 2013 and Word 2010 Details
The steps that you can follow in these versions of Word have been summarized below:
•Start Word with an empty document and click on the Mailings heading to see its ribbon: 
•Click on Start Mail Merge to drop down its list of options. One possibility at this point is to pick Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard… from the list. That wizard will also take you through all the steps required for merging your data to create the label, envelope or other document you want. If you choose this, just follow those prompts and you can ignore the rest of this section.
•Otherwise, if you want to do this more manually, from the Start Mail Merge drop down list choose Envelopes... or Labels… That brings up an appropriate Options window for your choice. The rest of the instructions below assume you are working on labels, but similar steps would apply for envelopes or other types of merges.
•The next step is to choose which data that Word mail merge is supposed to use. You do that by clicking on Select Recipients and navigating to the folder where you stored the Excel file you exported from DONATION.
•You can now create the template for the labels. In this case, you may just want the address block as your base. You do that by clicking on Address Block in the ribbon. In the window that pops up, please select all the requirements of the address that you want. You will notice that there is a preview window that will give you a sense of how your label will look. If you are satisfied, click the OK button. This will add the merge code «AddressBlock» to the main preview window for the first label. You can insert other fields by clicking on Insert Merge Field in the Mailings ribbon.
•You can then click on Update Labels to fill in all the labels.
•You can click Preview Results to see the results of the merging.
•At this point you can edit the data from DONATION. An example of why you may want to do that might be if you have a long list and you want to break the printing of the labels up for better management of that process. In this case, you can click on Edit Recipient List and add, remove, filter, sort, find and remove duplicates, validate addresses (this function may need a Microsoft add-on) and other functions before the final merge.
•The final step is to click on Finish & Merge (then choose the appropriate option under that, such as Print Documents) to complete the merge in Word.
This topic was last edited on Mar 23, 2023