Before discovering the pleasures of mail merge, it is not unreasonable to type addresses into mailing labels as in the example below. This is however difficult to manage should you wish to add further addresses, and the benefits of mail merge quickly become apparent - but maybe not if you have to retype all those addresses.

The company addresses used in this example, were taken from an old sample mailing list and may not reflect the current addresses of the companies concerned.

What you need to do is recover the addresses from those labels and convert them into a usable data file.

In the following examples I have toggled-on the formatting information (CTRL+SHIFT+8) to demonstrate more clearly what is happening.

The first step is therefore to extract the addresses by converting the table to text.

Click in the table and from the Table menu select Convert > Table to Text.

If each label had the same number of address lines, you could simply convert back to a table now, but they rarely do, so we now need a few more steps to complete the process.

First step is to insert a marker that will hold the ends of each address. Each address is terminated by (at least) a double paragraph mark, so we can run a wildcard search to replace that double paragraph mark with a random and unique string of characters to produce the result below. On reflection, '@' was not the most ideal choice as it is a reserved character in searches, but we can work round that one.

To search for a paragraph mark in a wildcard search, you must enter ^13 and not ^p in the 'Find what' string. The 'Replace with' string should, however, use ^p.

For more information on wildcard searching in Word see http://www.gmayor.com/replace_using_wildcards.htm  

Next step is to swap those paragraph marks for tabs, to put each record on its own line. The search string looks for each paragraph mark and the character preceding it, but *not* characters preceded by @. The replacement string restores the preceding character and adds a tab in place of the paragraph mark.

The result is as follows:

Next step is to lose the marker. Use a simple search, without the wildcard option, to replace the marker with nothing:

If you wish to sort the list into alphabetical order, you can do so now, or later when you have converted the list to a table.

You can now select the list and again from the Table menu, convert the selected text back to a table.

Add a title row at the top of the table. The names are not critical, just make them memorable and unique.

Because the original labels did not have a fixed number of lines, the different parts of the address do not line up vertically. This should not matter when you come to merge the addresses into the new label document. Simply include all the fields on the label.