You will need the Reporting permission to perform this action.
A mail merge lets you use a data source to automatically generate documents. The data and a document template merge to form a new document that contains each person's information. This is useful for baptism certificates, welcome letters, address labels, and more. This article explains how to perform a mail merge using One Church Software.
You will design a Word document containing the merge fields, then upload it into One Church to perform the mail merge. The instructions below use Word 2017, but they also work with earlier versions of Word that support mail-merge fields.
IMPORTANT: The query you use as the data source must include every merge field you reference in the document as a column in the results.
Mail Merge Template Structure
The mail merge template file is a Word document containing merge fields for the data you want to replace. Because it is a Word document, you can design it however you like. The most important part is that the merge fields are defined correctly.
How to Add a Merge Field
The allowed merge field variable names match the columns in your query results, except with underscores ( _ ) instead of spaces. For example, the "First Name" column becomes FIRST_NAME, "Primary Email" becomes PRIMARY_EMAIL, "Gender" becomes GENDER, and so on.
To add a merge field, type the variable name wherever you want it to appear in the document. Then highlight the text and choose Insert > Quick Parts > Field...
In the pop-up that appears, select MergeField under Field names. Enter the variable name (for example, FIRST_NAME) in the Field name text box, and make sure (none) is selected for the format. The form should look like the example below.
Repeat these steps for each merge field you want to add. Each merge field appears between << and >> in the document when added correctly. The screenshot below shows an example for the FIRST_NAME and LAST_NAME merge fields.
Once your template file is ready, upload the Word document into the system when performing the mail merge.
Running the Mail Merge
In One Church Software, go to Reporting > Query Builder and build the query you want to use as the data source for the mail merge. Click Run Query to generate your results, then open the Bulk Actions menu above the results table and choose Mail merge.
A window opens with the following fields:
Template - a built-in or previously saved mail merge template to use. The default is Use New Template.
File Upload - upload the mail merge template containing your content and data placeholders. See Mail Merge Template Structure above.
Enter a name to save template - to reuse this template later, enter a name here. If you leave it blank, the template is used one time only.
After filling in the fields, click Generate to run the mail merge. When it finishes, a single Word document downloads containing the merged results.
The number of pages in the resulting document equals the number of people times the number of pages in the template. For example, if the query returns 20 people and the template is 2 pages long, the merged document contains 40 pages.