My mom, after taking a year or two off, is getting back into sending out her massive Christmas card mailing.

In the past, my father had created a mail merge using Wordperfect, and unfortunately he was the only one who really understood how to use it. Also, things have become a little more complicated by my mom's move to GMail (when she moved homes, to get off the ISP's mail service). Now there are more up to date addresses in her GMail account than there were in the old mail merge database.

I'd like to figure out a good workflow for getting the necessary data out of GMail and into some sort of merge, probably using Word instead. My mom will also be moving to a Mac in the next year or so, and I'd like to make it so she can easily leave Wordperfect behind.

Grouping the desired contacts and exporting them to a CSV is easy enough, but is there a way to bring that into a merge of some sort?

When you do a mail merge in word you can use an excel file for the address list. So just save the CSV as a spread sheet.

Are you printing out personalized letters or just the envelopes ?

When she does move to the Mac, it will be easy (assuming this is to print labels or envelopes)

1. Open Address Book, and go into Preferences to set up google sync
2. (Optional) Add all the people for the cards to a group
3. With the people or group selected, go to File - Print, Click the down triangle, then pick envelopes or mailing label. Make sure to set the options for the types of labels or envelopes being used.

I've been using this method for a few years when my grandfather needs to send out a lot of invitations to a tournament he runs. He normally gets a spreadsheet with all the names and addresses, and we first export to CSV for import into Address Book.

For Word and Excel, I always forget the steps offhand, but it should be in help under "Mail Merge" for all the steps there.

I didn't know Address Book would sync with GMail. As it turns out, it doesn't. At least it didn't import anything after I set the sync up.

Nevermind. I had to manually run iSync.

Of course, that assumes that she has their snail mail addresses actually typed out into gmail's address book, as opposed to only existing in the body of an email message, somewhere.