The RISC MailMerge Wizard
As we have seen, RISC already integrates well with MS Word 2000 and above to produce form letters. Instead of printing one letter at a time per student, the new RISC MailMerge Wizard is used to produce all your personal mailings to parents. For example, if you need to send a personalised letter to every parent of a year 9 student, you can achieve this with just a few clicks of the mouse.
If you have run through the notes on how to create a RISC Form Letter, you already know how easy the process is - it's actually EASIER than merging using Word alone! That's the first step - constructing the form letter you'd like to send. Let's say it's an Excursion permission note that you'd like to send only to Girls in Year 6. You would type up your permission note as one of the 200 available RISC Form Letters and insert parent and student detail fields from RISC into the appropriate spots in the letter. Then save the form letter as normal.
Next open the Form Letters menu in RISC and select the RISC MailMerge Wizard option. The following screen will be displayed:
This four-step MailMerge Wizard is simple to use.
- Step 1 - Verify your default
printer.
RISC tells you which printer it would like to print your multiple letters to. If that's not the one you want, change it in Windows. - Step 2 - Select Your Form Letter.
In this example, the Grade 6 girls are going to the University of NSW. This form letter is selected from the same list that all RISC form letters are selected from. - Step 3 - Choose your recipients.
The first iteration of the MailMerge Wizard allows you to select groups of students by either Grade, Roll Class or Gender, or any combination of the above. Here, we have chosen all of Grade 6, regardless of Roll Class, but specifically Female gender. Future versions of this wizard are expected to allow for custom groupings of students. - Step 4 - Calculate, Merge and
Print.
A quick click of the Calculate button will verify the number of students RISC will print the letter for so that you can ensure your printer is stocked with enough of the right paper. Then you would click the Merge and Print button and sit back while the RISC MailMerge Wizard weaves its magic. You'll soon realise that it's also much easier to mail merge for students and parents using RISC than it is using MS-Word alone.
NOTE: The RISC MailMerge Wizard ONLY produces multiple-merged form letters. It does not create contact records for students in the database to say <form letter name> was produced and sent on <date>. There is no tracking of letters created with this wizard, unless you choose to manually create the contact records for each student yourself. You can use the new Mail Merge option in the Table View to produce multiple merged form letters for students based on contact records saved in the RISC Database.
The Register of
Individual Student Contact (RISC) is developed & distributed
by Marillion Designs.
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Information in this document is subject to change without notice.
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