This weeks applications adventure was a combining of Word and Excel called mail merger. All I can say is: Wow! I thought I was experienced in Microsoft products but this was new to me and it was awesome. For those of you not experienced in this, mail merging allows you to type up a form in word and insert information from an Excel file. For example, this week we made a grade book created in Excel and used Word to create a form letter and have it automatically insert fields from the spreadsheet, such as first and last name, grades and comments. Once the form was completed you simply hit merge fields and you have personalized lists for everyone. I can see many uses for this in my school, more to help my colleagues than to help myself but, it's all about sharing that information. We did not get into using filtering to create specific lists but that was a neat feature I got to play around with. It could be used for students that have not achieved a certain average or for attendance reports, really the list goes on and on. And while I would love to go on I will end it here and let you all explore mail mergers for yourself.
Until next time.
I am really glad that you had such a great experience with this weeks project. Me on the other hand, not so much. If it works I also agree that it is an excellent tool for the classroom. Until it allows me to use this application and actually do what it is supposed to I am going to stay as far away from it as I can!
ReplyDeleteI had a great experience using Mail Merge as well! How cool is it that you can personalize letters with information that you have already recorded? I plan to use this in the future and would love to know more about it.
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