That’s good news because many people don’t have a license for either of those apps. It’s easier if you only want to merge from Contacts.Īpple’s revived mail merge in Pages 12.1 is utter bliss, both on its own and by comparison to Word and Swift Publisher.

But despite the effort BeLight put into the feature, I found it more painful than Word to use when merging from spreadsheet data. To its credit, BeLight gave users a free license to Swift Publisher, its desktop publishing software, which has some rudimentary tools for mail merge. I used BeLight’s Labels & Addresses app for years, but the company opted not to upgrade it to 64-bit compatibility, so it died with macOS 10.15 Catalina. (Avery is a major producer of printable labels in all varieties.) What I remember as a quick set of clicks and formatting in the 1990s and 2000s took hours of fiddling to produce something that still didn’t look exactly like I wanted. I recently wrestled with Word to produce shipping labels for a Kickstarter project’s rewards, and every step was painful, despite its built-in templates for Avery labels. Microsoft Word has always had mail merge, but it’s far more complicated than the last time I used it. It’s commonly used to generate form letters, address labels, and name tags. A concept dating back at least four decades, mail merge lets you insert placeholders in a template document that are replaced with entries in a column of data in a spreadsheet or similar tabular format. Apple removed the feature from the iWork suite as part of the fundamental rewrite of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote in 2013.

1646: Security-focused OS updates, Photos Workbench review, Mastodon client wishlist, Apple-related conferencesĪfter nearly a decade, Apple has finally brought mail merge back to Pages.

1647: Focus-caused notification issues, site-specific browser examples, virtualizing Windows on M-series Macs.

#1648: iPhone passcode thefts, Center Cam improves webcam eye contact, APFS Uncertainty Principle.

#1649: More LastPass breach details and 1Password switch, macOS screen saver problem, tvOS 16.3.3 fixes Siri Remote bug.

#1650: Cloud storage changes for Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive quirky printing problem.

How to do a mail merge in word on mac