Use the check boxes to designate recipients
This method is most useful if your list is short.
- Select the check boxes next to the recipients you want to include, and clear the ones next to the recipients you want to exclude.
If you know you want to include most of the list in your merge, clicking Select All first makes it easy to clear particular records. Similarly, if you want to include only a few records in the list, click Clear All, and then select the records you want.
This is useful if you want to see items in alphabetical or numeric order.
- Click the column heading of the item you want to sort by. For example, if you want to display the list alphabetically by last name, click the Last Name column heading.
This is useful if the list contains records that you know you don't want to see or include in the merge. Once you've filtered the list, you can use the check boxes to include and exclude records as described in the previous section.
- Click the arrow next to the column heading of the item you want to filter by.
- Click any of the following:
- (Blanks) displays all the records in which the corresponding field is blank.
- (Nonblanks) displays all the records in which the corresponding field contains information.
- If your data source contains records that share the same information, and there are ten or fewer unique values in the column, you can filter by specific information. For example, if there are multiple addresses that list Australia as the country/region, you can filter on Australia.
The Mail Merge Recipients dialog box displays only the designated records. To display all the records again, click (All).
- For advanced sorting and filtering, click the arrow next to any column name, and then click (Advanced ). Use the Filter Records and Sort Records tabs to set up the sorting or filtering query you want.
- If you have installed address validation software, you can click Validate in the Mail Merge Recipients dialog box to validate your recipients' addresses.