Productivity Portfolio

In the past when I've created mailing labels, I've always started from Microsoft Word and pulled in the Outlook records I needed. The process uses a 6 Step wizard that is pretty easy if you're not dealing with too many contacts. So, when I was asked if you could create mailing labels for contacts for a specific category of Microsoft Outlook, I replied "yes". My reply was shortly followed by a "show me".

I dutifully followed the Word Mail Merge wizard and got to the point where I selected my Outlook Contacts. The Mail Merge Recipients dialog popped up and I scrolled across to find the Category column so I could resort the list. Guess which field is missing? Yes, category was not there.

I was amused, but not discouraged by this experience. I was still confident that Microsoft would have a way to accomplish the task. After all, categories seemed like such a logical qualifier for mailings. I then decided to start the task from Microsoft Outlook where I encountered a version problem.

They say "third time is a charm" which is good as two more people asked a similar question. However, the charm part belongs to our photographer friend, Vassi Koutsaftis, who had the patience to document the process and pass the directions along. We used his directions to create the tutorial which was done with Outlook 2003 and Word 2003.

The Flash tutorial we created starts with a Category view. We then selected a subset of records. The reasoning was when we started to ask people if they wanted labels for all contacts in a category, few said "yes". In reality, they wanted a subset of the category and not everyone.

The key to this task is creating the proper selection set. After that, the steps are similar when you hit Microsoft Word. If your focus is on categories, we suggest starting with these steps:

To create a selection set by category,

1. Click the Contacts button on your Outlook bar.

2. Change your view to By Category. This is the predefined view in Outlook that lists each contact on a separate line. (See category view snapshot below)

3. Select the contacts you want by pressing the Ctrl key and left-clicking each contact name.

4. Once you have the selection set created, you can follow the steps in the Flash tutorial below.