The Mail Merge tool in Word can be very helpful in combining information from a data source (such as names or addresses) with information in a standard document (such as letters or labels). If you have many, many records in your data source, though, the mail merge might not run as quickly as you like.
For example, let's say you are merging a large amount of data (10,000 or 20,000 records) with a single-page document to create a form letter. The most common method of doing a merge is to create a new document that contains the merged information. As each record is fetched and processed, a new page is added to the merged document. If you have 20,000 records in your data source, this means you are attempting to create a 20,000 page document! Word won't theoretically choke on such a huge document, but it may slow to a crawl depending on the capabilities of your computer.
There are a few things you can do to help speed things up. First of all, make sure you are using Normal view before you do the merge and that you turn off background repagination. This should stop Word from trying to repaginate the document during the merge process. You will also want to turn off any anti-virus software you use, or at least configure it so that it won't scan Word documents for viruses.
Another obvious thing to try is to not merge to a new document, but merge directly to the printer. Since mail merging is still a memory-intensive operation, you may still notice slowdowns while merging. In this case, you should apply any or all of the following items, which can generally conserve memory use on a PC:
After trying all these things, if you still can't get a mail merge to finish quickly, you will need to either add more memory or merge fewer records. In other words, instead of doing a single mail merge of 20,000 records, do ten mail merges of 2,000 records each.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (10774) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Speeding Up Mail Merges.
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2017-07-24 07:43:06
jake
Hi,
That's the worst advice ever, Nothing to do with the problem at all. If every time Microsoft gets it wrong and we all work around the problem, we'll end up with nothing but work arrounds!
How about actually fixing the problem?
2016-03-05 11:02:09
RM
Hi,
When I try to reduce the number of records I use for the merge, I end up with cutoff issues in my client letters.
I.e. the number of records in Word doesn't equal the number of lines in my Excel data.
So if I create 5 word documents with the Word mail merge, I end up with cutoff issues. I.e. my word doc will contain 1-2000 records, next one will be 2001-4000 records, etc.
But the 2000th record is often an excel line that is in the middle of my client data. (I have approx. 65,000 of excel lines end up with 18,000 letters).
So it means I need to somehow reconcile the beginning and end of all my resulting documents to figure out which client letters are complete or not and then remove or add.
Is there any way around this?
Thanks.
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