Xplan Essentials (UK) - Creating address labels

[david.mann]

Available from 7 November 2023

Contents

• Creating labels for mailings
• Running the Xport
• Creating the mail merge in Word (2016)

Creating labels for mailings

With the festive season almost upon us, we know that many of you like to send out seasonal cards to your clients.  Although we know some of you have defined your own solutions for this in Xplan, we thought we'd make it standard and available to all.  Of course, the same solution applies regardless of the time of year, if you have material you'd like to post out to your clients.

We have tested this out on Word 2016 but there is no reason why it wouldn't work on Office 365 - but the mail merge options may just look a little different.

The basis of the solution is: -

• An Xport, which extracts client's names (including preferred) and addresses.  This can be combined with an Advanced Search to filter out the clients you specifically want to create labels for (e.g. a subset of clients you look after, clients who are happy to receive correspondence via the post etc).  NB If you want just a list of the first named individuals in a joint client record, you can include Key Details | Is Master = "Yes" field in your advanced search criteria.
• As a CSV, this can then be imported into Word's mail merge feature, with its range of label sizes / layouts etc.

Running the Xport

There is a standard Xport on your site called "Client Names and Preferred Addresses".  For reference, it includes the following data sources: -

• Clients
• Address (with options set to exclude the entire row if no data is present and also to filter on just addresses marked as preferred)

We have also sorted by Surname and then by First Name.

The fields included are: -

• Clients > Entity ID
• Clients - Title
• Clients - Initials
• Clients - Preferred Name
• Clients - Forename
• Clients - Middle Name
• Clients - Surname
• Clients - Address Title
• Clients - Salutation
• Address - House Name / No.
• Address - Street Name
• Address - Street Name Extra
• Address - Town
• Address - County
• Address - Country
• Address - Postcode

Creating the mail merge in Word (2016)

1. Run the Xport described above.  We expect this usually to be run across a list of clients produced by an advanced search.

2. Open up a blank Word document.

3. Select the Mailings menu tab and then Start Mail Merge > Step-by-step Mail Merge Wizard from the toolbar.

4. In the right hand panel, in the Select Document type field, select "Labels".

5. At the bottom of the panel, select Next: Starting document.

6. In “Select starting document”, leave “Change document layout” selected.

7. Under Change document layout, click Label options and select / confirm your chosen label size (you will probably have to experiment with a few of these to begin with)

8. At the bottom of the panel, select Next: Select recipients.

9. In “Select recipients”, leave “Use an existing list” selected and under “Use an existing list”, click Browse.  Select the CSV which you've produced from the Xport and Click OK.

10. Wait for a few seconds (depending on how many client records you're uploading) and the first few record will appear.  I'd suggest leaving this as it is and just clicking OK.  This means you'll have full choice of what fields you want to include from the Xport.

11.  At the bottom of the right hand panel in Word, click “Next: Arrange your labels”.

12. In the Arrange your labels section of the right hand panel, click “More items”. This will bring up the list of fields in your input file / Xport.

13. Double click each one to insert them into the document and then click “Close”. You don’t have to use all of the fields in the input document if you don’t want them on your labels.

14. Back in the Word document, ensure you go through and add spaces and line breaks where needed. It may look a little odd when the merge code appears, but you can always tweak this if it doesn’t look right later.

15. Once you have inserted the required spaces and line breaks, click the Update all labels button on the right hand panel.

16. This will replicate the merge codes for each label. At the bottom of the right hand panel, click “Next: Preview your labels”.

17. If there are any issues, such as duplicated fields because you mistakenly inserted the same field twice, you can just click “Previous: Arrange your labels” at the bottom of the right hand panel and make changes to the first label’s code. NB don’t forget to click Update all labels so that you fix all labels.

18. When you’re happy, at the bottom of the right hand panel, click “Complete the merge”.You can then print from here or edit individual labels as required.