Hello,



I'm a marketing assistant for my company, and I want to send out a batch of magazines to our higher service-level clients.

I've generated a list of addresses by running a report on our back office system, and I now have a comprehensive list of clients and their addresses who need to receive magazines.

The problem is, the data is very messy, and a lot of the addresses are entered in different formats (some in block caps, some with uneven spacing, some with a street name and postcode but no town, etc.)

Furthermore, my manager doesn't want to send more than one magazine to each address, meaning that couples need to be addressed as Mr. and Mrs. Smith, or Mr. Smith and Ms. Jones for unmarried couples, etc.

Removing duplicates doesn't really help, as many of them go unnoticed due to aforementioned formatting errors. Also, for the duplicates it does identify, I'm left with only one partner of the couple, i.e. Ms. Jones or Mr. Smith - when both names need to go on the address label.

Question 1:
Is there any way of bulk formatting the addresses so that they're compatible with MailMerge? I'm reluctant to do this manually as there are 400+ different addresses!

Question 2:
Once formatted, is there a way to identify couples living at the same address and create a rule that tells MailMerge to create a single label addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Smith/Mr. Smith and Ms. Jones?

I'm willing to do the legwork if there's no way round this, but any shortcuts you know of that could help me would be greatly appreciated!

I've never used this tool before nor received any training (this is a very junior role as it's my first job out of university) so please assume no knowledge (apart from basic Excel skills)!

Thanks a lot,

Chloe