If you received a Microsoft Word document from a colleague or friend and can’t open it, it’s probably because it’s a docx file — the default file format starting with the release of Microsoft Word 2007. If you try to open the file in an earlier version of Word, you probably get a dialog box that looks like this:

Fortunately, Microsoft offers a solution. If you’re running an earlier version of Microsoft Office on a Windows PC, install Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. Be sure to follow the instructions carefully and install critical updates for Microsoft Office prior to installing the Compatibility Pack.

If you’re running Office on a Mac, install Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0.2.

Everyone knows you can drag over text to select it in Word, but employing a few other text-selection strategies can help you edit more efficiently. Following are my favorite text-selection tricks:

• Double-click a word to highlight it, including the space after it.
• Hold down the Ctrl key while selecting other chunks of text, so you can perform a single operation on all of the selected text. (I often use this technique to make a bunch of words bold or italic – I hold down the Ctrl key while double-clicking each word and then click the Bold button, for example.)
• Press Ctrl+A to select the entire document.
• Ctrl+click anywhere inside a sentence to select the entire sentence, along with the space after it.
• Triple-click anywhere inside a paragraph to select the entire paragraph.
• Click at the beginning of the section you want to highlight and then scroll down and hold down the Shift key while clicking at the end of the section you want to highlight.
• Hold down the Alt key while dragging over a column of text. This is very useful for selecting a column of text when the columns are separated by tabs. You can even use this technique to select a column of tabs.
• Position the insertion point at the beginning or end of the section you want to highlight, and then hold down the Shift key while using the arrow keys to extend the highlight over the section; you can use the left, right, up, down, PgUp, PgDn, Home, or End keys to extend the highlight.
• Move the mouse pointer to the left of a paragraph (so the pointer appears as an arrow pointing northeast). You can then…
  • Click to the left of a line of text to select it.
  • Click and drag down or up to select multiple lines of text.
  • Double-click to select the paragraph. (You can double-click, hold down on the second click, and drag down to select multiple paragraphs, but this is a tough move to master.)
  • Triple-click to select the entire document.

In my previous post, “Converting Text to a Table for a Mail Merge,” I showed you how to transform a list of names and addresses into a Word table in preparation for a mail merge. In this post, I show you how to complete a mail merge to place the names and addresses from that table on envelopes. (If you want to create labels, choose Labels instead of Envelopes in Step 4 and follow the onscreen clues.)

Important: Prior to performing a mail merge using a table or spreadsheet, make sure your table or spreadsheet has a row of bold column headings at the top, like Name, Address, CityStateZip. Don’t use spaces in the column headings. Word uses the column headings to extract information from the table or spreadsheet. Although the column headings are not essential, you’ll find them very helpful in making sure Word extracts the right information and puts it in the right place.

In this example, the city, state, and Zip code are all in one column with a column heading of CityStateZip. If you have a separate column for each, use a separate column heading for each.

1. Make sure the document that contains your list of names and addresses is closed.
2. Start with a new, blank document.
3. Enter the Mail Merge command. (In Word 2003, you choose Tools, Letters and Mailings, Mail Merge.) The Mail Merge pane appears, asking you which type of document you want to create.
4. Click Envelopes and then click Next: Starting document, near the bottom of the pane.



5. Under Change document layout, click Envelope options.



6. From the Envelope size drop-down list, choose the size of the envelope on which you’ll be printing – usually 6 3/4 for small envelopes or 10 for business envelopes – and then click OK. Word displays an envelop that includes whatever it has stored as your return address. Edit the return address, if necessary.



7. Click Next: Select recipients.



8. Under Use an existing list, click Browse. The Select Data Source dialog box appears.



9. Navigate to the folder in which your address list table is stored, select the document, and click Open. Word displays the Mail Merge Recipients list.



10. Review the list of recipients. (You can remove the check mark next to any recipient’s name to exclude them from the mail merge.) Click OK.



11. Click Next: Arrange your envelope. At this point, Word wants to know where you want the address placed and how you want the name, address, city, state, and Zip code arranged.



12. Click in the middle of the envelope to position the insertion point inside the text box where the address will appear.



13. Under Arrange your envelope, click More items. The Insert Merge Field dialog box appears, displaying the column headings in your table. (Although you could use the Address Block option instead, I avoid doing so, because in my version of Word, I get an annoying space before the person’s name.)



14. Double-click each field (column head) you want to include as part of the address. This inserts the fields that will draw entries from your table. When you’re done, click Close.



15. Arrange the fields as you want the information to appear on the envelope. In this example, I placed a soft return after each field by pressing Ctrl+Enter, to place each entry on a line of its own. (You could use Enter to insert more space between each item.)



16. Click Next: Preview your envelopes. Word displays the first envelope addressed with information from your table.



17. If everything looks okay, click Next: Complete the merge. If not, then click the Previous option and make adjustments, as necessary.
    
18. Load your envelopes into your printer and click Print.

Sometime in the near future, I’ll be offering a few more tips on the mail merge feature. In the meantime, feel free to post your own tips and tricks or questions about mail merge, and I’ll try to address them as time permits.

My wife came home from a high school reunion planning meeting with a list of addresses she was to send invitations to. During the meeting, the 150 addresses were divvied up among 5 people to reduce the workload of having to manually address so many envelopes. When I heard of this and saw the list, I was dumbfounded. Somebody had already typed the list, it was in an electronic format, so why not just do a mail merge and print the envelopes and mailing labels? That would take all of about 5 minutes.

You can use a Word table, Excel worksheet, or Access database as the source of addresses for your mail merge. This post shows you how to transform a list of addresses typed in a Word document into a table by using search and replace and the Convert Text to Table option. As long as you have the information you need already typed into a document, you should never have to re-type it. Converting the data into a useable form is almost always easier, and the Search and Replace tools can come in very handy.

Apparently the planning committee didn’t know about mail merge or they thought the list was in a format they couldn’t use for a mail merge, so I offered to lend a hand. I discovered that someone had typed the address list into Microsoft Word, so I asked my wife to have the owner of the document email it to me. The addresses were neatly typed with a return after each line and two returns to separate each name-address entry. They were not typed in alphabetical order. They looked something like this:

Wilma Flinstone

1500 Stone Hill

Bedrock, CA 55555

Jane Jetson

1234 Northern Lights

Solar, Illinois 33333

I decided to convert the list into a table. Here’s what I did:

1. Used Edit, Replace to replace the double paragraph marks (double returns) with four asterisks. (To replace double paragraph marks, you type ^p^p in the Find box and **** in the Replace box and then click Replace All.)



2. Used Edit, Replace to replace all single paragraph marks with tabs. (To replace a single paragraph mark with a tab, you type ^p in the Find box and ^t in the Replace box and then click Replace All.)



3. Used Edit, Replace to replace each series of four asterisks with a single return. (To replace double paragraph marks, you type **** in the Find box and ^p in the Replace box and then click Replace All.)



4. Selected all the text by pressing Ctrl+A.
5. Chose Table, Convert, Text to Table to covert the list of addresses into a table.
6. Under Table Size, set the number of columns to 3 and clicked OK. This converted my address list into a three-column table with an address in each row.



7. Saved the file to My Documents so I could use it to for the mail merge.

Tip: It’s a good idea to include a row at the top of the table to name the entries. Click in a box at the top of the table and use the Table, Insert, Rows Above command to insert a blank row at the top. Then, type a descriptive column head in each cell, like Name, Address, CityStateZip. (Don’t use any spaces.) Make the column heads bold to set them off from the rest of the entries in the table.

Come back and visit for Part II of this series on performing a mail merge.

When most people want some space between paragraphs in a Word document, they simply press the Enter key a couple extra times. While that certainly does the trick, it’s a very sloppy way of formatting and can cause all sorts of formatting problems for anyone who gets stuck laying out the document later. A more precise and efficient way control the distance between paragraphs is to add space above or below the paragraphs. Here’s what you do:

1. Click anywhere in the paragraph you want to add spacing above or below. To select everything, press Ctrl+A.
2. Enter the Format Paragraph command:
   • In Word 2007, click the Home tab and click Paragraph.
   • In earlier versions of Word, click Format, Paragraph.
3. Click the arrows next to the Spacing Above or Below boxes to add the desired amount of space before or after the paragraph. (I usually add 6 points below each paragraph and leave the Spacing Above setting at 0.)
4. Click OK. You should now have a nice, uniform amount of space between paragraphs.

Tip: If you have a document with a bunch of extra blank paragraphs, you can get rid of all the extras by using Find and Replace (Ctrl+H) to replace ^p^p with ^p. Repeat the process several times until Word no longer finds ^p^p. You can do the same thing to remove superfluous spaces in your document. Just replace two spaces with one several times until all occurrences of two spaces are removed.