Christmas Time!

It doesn’t matter if you are sending real Christmas cards or electronic ones, Outlook can be useful to manage either. This special Christmas guide helps you prepare by using a special Christmas category, mail merge tips and instructions for cards and envelopes and links to templates and pictures you can use in your design.

Christmas category

You probably don’t send a Christmas card to all your individual contacts. In that case it is useful to tag the contacts that you want to send a Christmas card with a category called "X-mas" or something similar. When you have multiple members of a single family in your Contacts folder who all live on the same address, you might want to only add one member to the "X-mas" category for a more convenient mail merge (for the next section).

To add an "X-mas" category;

• Outlook 2007
  Select a contact-> Edit-> Categorize-> All Categories…-> New…-> type; X-mas-> press OK
• Previous versions of Outlook
  Select a contact-> Edit-> Categories…-> type; X-mas-> press Add to List

Once you’ve added the category, you can select another contact (or even multiple) and add them to the X-mas category via the list of categories in the same dialog as above. Removing someone (didn’t receive a card back?) can be done in the same way too by un-ticking the box in front of the X-mas category.

Now that all the people that you want to send a card at are added to the X-mas category, you can easily group them together by using the view By Category;

• All versions of Outlook except Outlook 2003
  View-> Current View-> By Category
• Outlook 2003
  View-> Arrange By-> Current View-> By Category

Mail Merge

While many people would say that a Christmas card should be a real card and written personally, the mail merge function can still be useful to create labels for the envelopes or even print directly to the envelopes. You can find more about how to do a mail merge in this guide.

As a Greeting Line consider using the word "Family" and the variable "Last Name" so that the label says "Family Doe" instead of "John Doe".

Whether or not you are printing to labels or to the envelopes directly, I would recommend to first try it with normal paper to see if it prints out to your liking. If not, you can still make adjustments before printing it to (the more expensive) labels or envelopes.

Templates

Having a nice Christmas design for your card, email or even envelope really rounds things off. There are a lots of templates already on the Microsoft Office website which you can use directly. Additionally, to lighten up your design even more, you can do an image search on either Google or Bing (my favorite for searching images).

All there is left to say; Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!