This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
The mail merge functionality in Business Central is relatively new, having been introduced in the 2021 Wave 1 Release.
The purpose behind this functionality is to allow the mail merge functionality of Microsoft Word to use data from Business Central. For example, you might want to send a document to a lot of recipients to tell them of a change of address or produce mailing labels for a brochure to be sent to all customers.
The mail merge is configured first in Business Central where you start to create a new Word document into which you choose the tables and fields to be available and then export a zip containing a blank Word document and data source which you can use to create the document into which the data will be merged and place the fields. This document is then imported back to Business Central and is then ready to be used.
When a mail merge is done, you can apply filters to restrict the data and then produce the merge, which can be in Word, PDF, HTML or text formats. Unfortunately, there is no option to email the resulting mail merged document, which seems an odd limitation in 2024.
Over the next couple of articles in this series, I will show how a Word document for mail merge can be created and then used.