Nothing says "impersonal and uncaring" as much as form letter sent to a group of people, whether it's your annual Holiday letter to friends or a form sent to clients and potential clients. It doesn't matter whether it's a traditional mailed letter or sent via email, it's still impersonal. It doesn't have to be this way. Customizing form letters to make them appear more personal and directed specifically at the recipient isn't hard.

It's called Mail Merge, and you can do it right from Outlook using your contact data.

The first step is picking the contacts you want to include in the merge. You can hold the control or shift key as you select contacts or use custom views to display the contacts you want to use. This is a good reason to use categories--then you can group by category and select the contacts.

Next, select Tools->Mail Merge to open the Mail Merge dialog, and you're almost done. Choose whether to use all contact fields or only those fields in the view. Then choose the type of document to merge and select OK to complete the merge. The selected contacts are exported to a document called OMM.doc for Word to use as the data source.

Mail Merge tip 1: "Contact fields in the current view" means fields in the view, including any you need to scroll to see, not just the fields you can see on screen.

Mail Merge tip 2: You can save the data source document to use again and again, even if you didn't select the option on the mail merge dialog. Use search to find OMM*.doc and copy it to your documents directory.

All that's left to do now is prepare your form letter. If you're new to mail merge, use the Mail Merge Wizard to lead you through the final steps, using View->Task Pane to show the Mail Merge task pane.

If you're comfortable not using the wizard, use the Mail Merge toolbar to insert fields and the ABC button to display your data in the merge fields. When you're finished, send the document to the printer or email it.

Wasn't that easy?

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's coauthor of Word 2002: The Complete Reference (Osborne, 2001) and Beginning Visual Basic 6 Application Development (for Wrox Press). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.