Although KOffice is not yet at the level of functionality that OpenOffice is, it's still a pretty powerful office suite that has very little coverage. So, this is my first contribution to the instructional documentation of KDE's word processor.

Looking at my previous episode for OpenOffice, let's create the same form letter in KWord. It looks something like this...

To help illustrate my example, I've put * into the letter to act as place-holders. These will be replaced with my mail merged information, which we're going to define next.

Begin by clicking on the menu items Tools -> Configure Mail Merge... This will open up a dialog box called ''Mail Merge Configuration.'' To create a new list of mail merge entries, click on the Create New... option. A second dialog box will appear. The dialog boxes should look something like this...

Click on OK to create a new data source.

Begin by clicking on the Add Entry icon (this is the third icon from the right, in the row of icons at the top of the dialog box). This is the first field you will enter. Click OK when you've entered the field name. In this example, I have three fields I wish to create: Superhero, Nickname, City. Therefore I will be adding three entries.

Once I've gotten the three data fields created, I will add records to those fields. I begin by entering data against the three entries I just created. When ready to add a second record, click on the Add Record icon (fourth from the right). See the following screenshot to see what my table looks like.

When you're finished entering records, click the Close button.

Now we're ready to add the mail merge fields to the letter. Click next to the first *, then click on the menu items: Insert -> Variables -> Mail Merge... Now select the entry, Superhero and click OK.

Move on to the next two * and add Nickname and City the same way.

Remove the *, as they are no longer needed. The letter should look something like this:

You can now preview your mail merge documents by going back to the menu items: Tools -> Configure Mail Merge... and click on the Print Preview... button.

When your ready to print your mail merged documents, click on the menu items: File -> Print -> Print

And that's it! You now know how to use mail merge with KDE's KWord-processor. Enjoy!