Opening Mail Merge Data Files With Excel

If you’ve created a data source in Word for use in mail merges and are beginning to despair because you want to use the information in other Office components, you can take solace in the fact that you can quite easily open your data source in Excel.

1. Locate the data file on your hard drive. It will have an Access icon beside it. (By default, Word data files are save in the My Data Sources folder in your My Documents folder)
2. Right click on the file name
3. Select Open With from the pop up menu
4. On the sub menu click on Excel (If you Excel isn’t on the list, click on Choose Program…, select Excel from the list, and click OK)
5. Excel will open a Workbook containing your data; a header row will display the field names
6. Save your document as you normally would

Once you have a spreadsheet containing your data, you can port it to Access or Outlook.