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Merging Documents With Advisors Assistant

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Merging Documents With Advisors Assistant Overview

Advisors Assistant has a direct link with Microsoft Word that can be used as a powerful time-saving correspondence tool. Whether sending a letter or email to a specific contact to confirm an appointment, or mass mailing your latest newsletter to all of your prospective clients, Advisors Assistant will do this with ease.

Using Microsoft Word's Mail Merge feature your clients’ personal, insurance and investment information can be automatically entered into letters, emails, labels, envelopes, and any other documents you can create using Microsoft Word.

Microsoft Word is an extremely powerful word processor, and it has many features available for mail merging letters and sending mass mailings that can greatly help you increase your marketing efforts right from your office. While Advisors Assistant Support can not help with the advanced features of MS Word, there are many avenues of training for Word that can help you become a mailing expert.

Once you start using Advisors Assistant and Microsoft Word together you’ll see that the processes for sending single letters, mass mailings, and emails are almost identical. And learning to fully use the integration between Advisors Assistant and Word is one of the biggest time savers available with Advisors Assistant, as well as a powerful way to help you increase sales and take your business to the next level.

Some important things you should know about printing documents with Advisors Assistant and MS Word:

•	Clicking on the Word Action Button from any View Screen allows you to send a document to the single name you are viewing.

•	Mass Mailing is available through the Advisors Assistant Selection Reports. First you select your names, then you send the information to Word to print the letters, envelopes, labels or emails.

•	The documents you are accessing are saved to the My Documents\Advisors Assistant\WordMergeDoc folder on the computer you are using.

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Advisors Assistant includes a few mail merge documents with the program to help you get started. Two of these are the "AA Master Letter.doc" and "AA Master Email.doc." They are designed to be used as a template for you to write your own letters and emails, without having to go through the steps to set a new document up as a mail merge document. You can edit your Master documents for font, logo, etc. as you'd like so that every time you use it your customizations will be available.

•	The letters and emails you create are set up in Word as mail merge documents, and they do not save with the contact's information in the document. For individual documents you can save the letters with the contact data using the MS Word "Merge To New Document" feature.

•	When sending a single letter or email, you can copy the text of the letter or email into the Advisors Assistant Letter Log.

•	When sending mass mailings or broadcast emails, you can log basic information about the mailing into each recipients' notes.

These instructions are written for Microsoft Word 2003. While other versions of Word have very similar mail merge steps, some of the icons have changed. Please call Advisors Assistant Support if you have questions about the Mail Merge Help and the version of Word you are using.

Microsoft's Mail Merge Toolbar

When you open a letter from Advisors Assistant, Advisors Assistant will automatically open the Microsoft Mail Merge Toolbar to help you in writing and printing your documents. A description of the mail merge icons is below:

Main Document Setup

Allows you to change the type of document, such as from a Letter to an Envelope document.

Open Data Source

If you were using a data source other than Advisors Assistant, you could open that data using this icon. This is not supported with Advisors Assistant Mail Merge.

Mail Merge Recipients

This Icon will open the list of names in your wordmerge file from Advisors Assistant. You can then manipulate the list of names. This is an advanced Mail Merge feature of Word that is not supported through Advisors Assistant Support.

Insert Address Block

You can set up an "Address Block" in Word that will insert a group of fields that you specify as the address fields. The Address Block can be used but requires using the First Name and Last Name fields instead of the Addressee Field in Advisors Assistant which is designed for Joint mailings and address customization. This is an advanced Mail Merge feature of Word that is not supported through Advisors Assistant Support.

Insert Greeting Line

You can set up a "Greeting Line" in Word that will insert a field that you specify as the greeting, with "Dear." The Greeting Line can be used but requires using the First Name or Nickname fields instead of the Greeting Field in Advisors Assistant which is designed for Joint mailings and address customization. This is an advanced Mail Merge feature of Word that is not supported through Advisors Assistant Support.

Insert Merge Fields

Advisors Assistant provides quite an extensive list of data that can be inserted into your documents. Any time you wish to insert a new "merge field" into your document, click this icon and select the field you wish to insert from the list.

Insert Word Field

Word has some advanced options available for printing your merge documents. The Word Fields will perform certain functions or run formulas. This is an advanced Mail Merge feature of Word that is not supported through Advisors Assistant Support.

View Merged Data

Toggles back and forth between viewing the merge field names, and viewing the data from Advisors Assistant.

Highlight Merge Fields

Toggles a highlighting of the merge fields on and off.

Match Fields

Opens the list of merge fields for matching with Word Address Block and Greeting Line fields. This is an advanced Mail Merge feature of Word that is not supported through Advisors Assistant Support.

Propagate Labels

If you're creating a new Label document, you can use this icon to fill in the other labels on the page based on the merge fields you set up for the first label on the page. This icon is only active if you're creating new labels.

Record Viewing

You can scroll through the list of names you're merging using this Record Viewing Toolbar. The white box tells you which record number you're viewing, then you can use the arrow buttons to move backwards and forwards through the records or jump to the beginning or end of the list.

Find Entry

Allows you to search your data for a keyword in a specific field. This is an advanced Mail Merge feature of Word that is not supported through Advisors Assistant Support.

Check For Errors

Word will merge your data and report if any inconsistencies occur, such as a merge field name in your document that does not have corresponding data in the merge file.

Merge To New Document

This option will create a new document with your data merged into the document. The new document is no longer a mail merge document, and will need to be saved separately from the master merge document you are using. This is useful when you are using mail merge with Advisors Assistant, and need to save a copy of the document to your computer (then you can link it through the Advisors Assistant View Client With Files Screen.)

Merge To Printer

This option will merge your data into the document and send it directly to the printer. It will give you the option of merging all records or selecting a few records before sending the document to the printer.

Merge To E-mail

This option will merge your data into an email, allowing you to send single and broadcast emails. Additional information on sending emails with Advisors Assistant is available in the Email Help.

Merge To Fax

If you have a fax program on your computer to can merge directly to the fax program.This is an advanced Mail Merge feature of Word that is not supported through Advisors Assistant Support.