Need to produce a stack of letters or documents for different people? Don't fret. In conjunction with Full Fabric, Microsoft Word's mail merge feature will do the hard work for you, making personalization possible without having to type a single personal detail about your recipients. Read this article to learn how to kill manual data entry like the Terminator and save the day (…or at least time).
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​Hasta la vista, old practices! 🐢💨🔪

➜ What is a letter?

➜ What types of letters can I create?

As with many things, this is a case of borrowing a popular concept, stripping it down to its most basic level, and then adapting it digitally. Ergo, a letter is essentially a document sent by someone to somebody else. But it's never that simple with Full Fabric, is it? 😏 So let's try again: a letter is a document destined for a person, generated, filled out, and sent through Full Fabric. And, to be clear, this means any official school document – examples soon to come.

Now you ask: how can a document be generated and filled out by Full Fabric? We go into that here, but the short version is: by creating a .docx file to use as a template containing merge fields that will be replaced with information from Full Fabric (for example, name, address, program, etc.), uploading the template, and then generating a letter for a profile, at which point the system will automatically merge the intended data into the document. The result should be something like this:

As you can see, when a merge occurs, the merge fields in the Word document are substituted with the corresponding information in Full Fabric. Consequently, the variable information is different for every profile, and all you have to do in terms of writing is compose the core text and add the merge fields where they belong. Brilliant, right? 💖

You can use Letters to generate Visa invitation letters, acceptance offers to degree-granting programs, scholarship award letters, application rejection letters, regular and proforma invoices, certificates of registration to short courses, diplomas, etc., because any of the public fields from the profile Info tab, the journey schema, your school's programs and classes (such as names and dates), and conditions for offer and acceptance letters, is "pullable". 🎣 So, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, you really can create any school document you want where part of the text is the same but a degree of personalization is required.

However, don't just take our word for it and check out the next article, where we discuss merge fields in greater detail. 🌽

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PUBLISHED: June 22, 2020
​LAST UPDATED: June 29, 2022 at 4:17 p.m.