MailMerge

“WHOA!” I gloated audibly.
“It’s nice to encounter a ‘pyooter function that doesn’t render hairballs,” I said; “after wrastling with Amazon the other day.”
I say that, but 23 years ago I came home from the hospital, after my stroke, and found slinging words (writing) was much easier due to computer word-processing.
30 years ago if I had to insert anything, or fix errors (like spelling, etc), I’d find myself retyping whatever I wrote. (ARRRGH!)
Often I let errors fly to avoid retyping. Priorities man!
The best word-processing advance was spellcheck. It flagged mistypes,  which often result from a stroke = sloppy keyboarding.
Spellcheck flags most, but I still hafta edit to fix valid words — like “top” for “to.”
The next best advance was no longer using paper. What you wrote displayed on-screen.
You can insert willy-nilly. Just locate your curser and start typing — although sometimes I create a separate document to avoid mucking the first.
Then I copy/paste that.
Wrastling computers is fun! I know a stroke-survivor, now dead, who ended up half paralyzed.
Yet he continued driving his Windoze PC.
My rig is a MAC (Gasp! Of-the-Devil I tell ya!).
A couple weeks ago I hit Word’s MailMerge manager by mistake. There was my Avery label sheet displayed with inserts marked.
Started me thinking. (Gasp again!)
My niece in south FL does her Christmas-Card labels with Word’s® MailMerge.
We talked about setting up my own MailMerge next visit (probably next month).
“You hafta set up a data-file,” she said. “MailMerge imports that.”
Her data-file was Excel®.
“Wait a minute!” I thought.”I already got a data-file, so-to-speak. All my addresses are ‘Pages’ text-documents.”
Perhaps I could copy each, then paste to MailMerge.
Not as fast as importing an Excel data-file, but creating that Excel data-file would take hours.
So I tried it. Copy the Pages address text-file, then paste into the MailMerge thingy.
Worked! Soon I was printing entire sheets of varied labels.
Importing an Excel data-file is a slam-dunk idea. But creating that data-file would involve mucho hair-pulling.
I got better things to do. Laundry awaits, as does my dog, lawn to mow, and slinging words.
Why should I create an Excel data-file when I already got all my addresses as text documents?
Right at the moment I only got one possible import, MailMerge. I need many more to go to all that trouble creating that data-file.

• RE: “MAC, Gasp!........” —All my siblings drive PCs, and claim MACs are toys.
• Avery is my label-sheet maker. They are 8&1/2 by 11 and fit my printer. Multiple labels are on them.
• I’ve always been somewhat intimidated by Word’s MailMerge. The name itself is lousy. Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, had to call it something.