Trying to create a selectable distribution list for addresses

[jnovi86]

I work for a public agency and we have to send notices quite often. Right now we open our list template in a label layout, then manually go through the whole list deleting people we don't need, then cut and paste all the remaining contacts to organize them.

it is incredibly time consuming, so I was hoping there would be a way to either just select the people we want or deselect the ones we don't then populate a list with only the contacts we want already formatted in the label headings.

[macropod]

What application(s) are you using for this?

[jnovi86]

We already have a 7 page list of people and addresses saved as a template in word (2010 I think but I just started so it could be a different version) and each time we have to send notice we open the template, go through the whole thing and delete every name and address we don't need, then cut and paste the remaining ones to print on sticky labels to mail out. What I want to do is maybe make like a list where all the names are there and you can scroll through and select who to add and it puts them on the document to print, or if its easier make a list where you de-select the ones you don't want to remove them but the ones you want get pulled to the top so there's no gaps in printing. Hopefully I explained it a bit better.

[macropod]

What you really should be doing is maintaining the list in a format that is suitable for mailmerges, perhaps in an application such as Excel, although a Word table could also be used. You could then use Word's mailmerge tools to filter the list, either on the basis of using SKIPIF fields to skip over records in which a designated field is used to indicate whether a particular record is to be included, or by directly filtering the records in Word. For basic mailmerge procedures, see:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/wo...101857701.aspx
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/wo...001034920.aspx
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MailMerge/...AMailMerge.htm