![]() You can access additional address options by drilling down in More Fields.You can now print the document as a series of pages, cards, or envelopes.Pages creates a new document with one page for each merged item. If the preview looks correct, click Merge.Click Preview to see what data will be filled in for each merged entry.(If the group you need doesn’t exist, go to the Contacts app, and create and populate it.) You can draw your data from All Contacts or filter by groups.When you’re finished adding fields, click the Merge button at the top of the pane to open the Mail Merge dialog.(Note that multi-line entries, like an address, will insert hard returns at the ends of lines, like the address line see a tip below.) Choose an item from the list or More Fields, which lets you drill down into other contact fields. The fields listed come from the Contacts app.(You can instead choose Insert > Mail Merge Field.) Click Add Merge Field in the Mail Merge pane.Position your cursor in the text where you want the field to go.In the Mail Merge pane at the right, you can populate your document with fields that will be replaced by data: You can merge with data from Contacts or a spreadsheet, as I explain in the next two sections. (My examples here are with Pages for macOS, but Apple also brought mail merge to Pages for iOS and iPadOS.) Once you’re set, in the Document sidebar, click Mail Merge at the bottom to reveal the Mail Merge options sidebar. Keep the document in word-processing mode if you choose File > Convert to Page Layout, mail merge becomes unavailable.Ĭlick the Document icon at the far right of the toolbar to change the page dimensions, such as to an envelope or note size. Start with mail merge in Pages by opening an existing document or creating a blank one. However, if you have page-based documents to merge, Pages has become your best option. ![]() If you’re printing entries only from your contacts, Apple’s Contacts app offers built-in label printing with selectable Avery and DYMO templates. My ultimate solution for printing labels after many, many hours of testing was Avery’s Design & Print service (free account required), which is clever but limited. Pages doesn’t yet handle labels or any blocks of placeholders that would require inserting multiple records on a single page that fill with the next item from the data source. The bad news? You can merge “letters, cards, and envelopes,” according to Apple. That’s good news because many people don’t have a license for either of those apps. It’s easier if you only want to merge from Contacts.Īpple’s revived mail merge in Pages 12.1 is utter bliss, both on its own and by comparison to Word and Swift Publisher. But despite the effort BeLight put into the feature, I found it more painful than Word to use when merging from spreadsheet data. To its credit, BeLight gave users a free license to Swift Publisher, its desktop publishing software, which has some rudimentary tools for mail merge. I used BeLight’s Labels & Addresses app for years, but the company opted not to upgrade it to 64-bit compatibility, so it died with macOS 10.15 Catalina. (Avery is a major producer of printable labels in all varieties.) What I remember as a quick set of clicks and formatting in the 1990s and 2000s took hours of fiddling to produce something that still didn’t look exactly like I wanted. I recently wrestled with Word to produce shipping labels for a Kickstarter project’s rewards, and every step was painful, despite its built-in templates for Avery labels. Microsoft Word has always had mail merge, but it’s far more complicated than the last time I used it. It’s commonly used to generate form letters, address labels, and name tags. A concept dating back at least four decades, mail merge lets you insert placeholders in a template document that are replaced with entries in a column of data in a spreadsheet or similar tabular format. Apple removed the feature from the iWork suite as part of the fundamental rewrite of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote in 2013. #1652: OS updates, DPReview shuttered, LucidLink cloud storageĪfter nearly a decade, Apple has finally brought mail merge back to Pages.#1653: Apple Music Classical review, Authory service for writers, WWDC 2023 dates announced.1654: Urgent OS security updates, upgrading to macOS 13 Ventura, using smart speakers while temporarily blind.#1655: 33 years of TidBITS, Twitter train wreck, tvOS 16.4.1, Apple Card Savings, Steve Jobs ebook. ![]()
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