NewViews for Non-Profit Housing uses Mail Merge to generate personalized form letters, notices, labels, etc. The Mail Merge feature enables you to substitute portions of a document (e.g. recipient names and addresses) with information from a data source (e.g. member/tenant accounts).
In order to perform a mail merge you need the following:
A Word document (form letter, notice, label, etc.) that can be used as a template.
A data source file (generated from the data in a set of books).
Optionally, a custom script which can be used to filter or manipulate the data before it is merged.
The Word template contains standard text and merge fields. When the two are merged, the appropriate information from the data source file is substituted for each merge field. A separate merged document is produced for each item in the data source file (e.g. for each member/tenant account marked in a block).
The process of doing a mail merge is as follows:
In NewViews, select an item or mark a block of items (e.g. member/tenant accounts) containing data that you want to use in your mail merge. You can also choose to merge all the items in a table.
Note: In most cases, you must first switch to a view that displays the data you want to use in the mail merge.
Issue the Tools>Mail Merge command and fill in the prompt to merge the data with the Word template.
NewViews for Non-Profit Housing provides a set of nine Word templates that can be used to produce some of the standard forms that are used by non-profit and co-op housing providers. These templates can and should be modified to suit your specific needs. See Sample Mail Merge Templates and Modifying Mail Merge Templates for more information.
You can also create your own templates that can be merged with data from your books. See Creating New Mail Merge Templates. However, in order to create new templates, or to insert additional merge fields into existing templates, you will first have to create a data source file.
The links below will take you through the mail merge process step by step.