Addressing envelopes in Word and drawing in Writer and Word

Once you've done a mail merge in Word you can put the documents in window envelopes, but here’s a classier way.

With field codes showing select the entire address block at the head of the merge letter – so it turns black, rather than grey – and copy it to the clipboard. Now go to Tools, Letters and Mailings, Envelopes and Labels and turn to the Envelopes tab if you are using Word 2003 or earlier.

Word 2007 users will find Envelopes the left-most item on the Mailing ribbon. Type in, if you want, a return address or just the name of your organisation.

Check the Options button to make sure you have the right size envelopes selected – this will usually be DL with A4 paper. Leave the Delivery Address box blank, and click the ‘Add to Document’ button.

It now helps if you make Text Boundaries visible from View Options, and you’ll see that Word has obligingly inserted a frame to hold the delivery address. Paste the address block field in here – you may need to do a bit of moving or resizing of the frame.

Click on the ‘View Merged Data’ button on the Merge toolbar (2003) or the ‘Preview Results’ button (2007) and you should find that each letter now has a correspondingly addressed envelope preceding it.

All that remains is to print them. If you have a printer with more than one tray, you should be able to set this up to print the envelopes from one tray and the letters from another.

If you don’t, then there’s a cunning solution. Fill your printer tray with envelopes, then click on the ‘Merge to Printer’ button (Word 2003) or ‘Finish and Merge’, ‘Print Document’ (Word 2007). You’ll get a dialogue asking if you want to print all, the current record or a range.

If you are of a cautious nature, you could try scrolling to the letter with the longest address and printing just the current record. When you are confident that the envelopes will print correctly select ‘All’ and OK.

In the second, ‘Print’, dialogue, select ‘Odd pages’ from the ‘Print’ option bottom left. OK this, and you should shortly have a stack of perfectly printed envelopes. Repeat the print merge for the even pages, with a tray full of A4 paper, and you’ll have a corresponding stack of letters.

All you have to do now is stuff the latter into the former, and here’s an easy way to fold the letters in the right place.

Draw a horizontal line somewhere in the left or right margin, but making sure it’s in the printable area of the page. Right-click on it and ‘Format Autoshape’. Set the line weight, colour and length to something just visible, such as 0.5pt, 25% grey and 1cm and set its vertical position to be 9.9cm relative to the page.

When the letters are printed fold the bottom of the sheet up to the line, then the top of the sheet down over it. You’ll get a perfect, straight, DL-envelope fit.