How to Preview a Merged Document in Word 2013

Word 2010 For Dummies

You should use the Preview Results command in Word 2013to ensure that your final, merged document looks good and doesn’t require changes before it’s officially merged. Here’s how to work things:

On the Mailings tab, in the Preview Results group, click the Preview Results command button.

The fields in the main document vanish! They’re replaced by information from the first record in the recipient list. What you see on the screen is how the first customized mail-merge document appears. Hopefully, everything looks spiffy.
When things don’t look spiffy, click the Preview Results button again and then edit the main document. Start over. Otherwise…
Peruse the records.

Review every merged document to ensure that everything looks right. Use the record-browsing buttons in the Preview Results group to move forward or backward through the records. Look for these problems:
- Formatting mistakes, such as text that obviously looks pasted in or not part of the surrounding text
- Punctuation errors and missing commas or periods
- Missing spaces between or around fields
- Double fields or unwanted fields, which happen when you believe that you’ve deleted a field but haven't
- Awkward text layouts, strange line breaks, or margins caused by missing or long fields
To fix any boo-boos, you must leave Preview mode and then go back and reedit the main
Click the Preview Results command button again to exit Preview mode.

You're now ready to perform the merge.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.