It's the document that you want to make personalised copies of when you
merge to multiple recipients.
e.g. Suppose you have an important business letter that you created in
Word. It might look like this
Canada
H0H 0H0
Attn. S Claus 26th December 2008
Dear Santa
Thank you so much for the partridge...
Yours
Peter Jamieson
You then realise that you need to send a rather similar letter to a list
of people that you created, let's say in Excel. This list contains 3
columns - a multiline address, a name, a closing, and a short
description of a gift. So you turn that letter into a Mail Merge Main
Document by
a. connecting it to the list of people (termed the Mail Merge Data Source)
b. inserting "placeholders", i.e. Mail Merge Field Codes, which Word
will let you select from the Data Source, so the letter looks more like
this:
address 26th December 2008
Dear name
Thank you so much for the gift ...
closing
Peter Jamieson
During the merge, Word produces one copy of the Mail Merge Main Document
for each row of data in the Data Source, replacing the placeholders by
the data in the current row of the Data Source.
That's the essence of it, anyway.
Peter Jamieson
http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk
Tyonne wrote: