I have yet to find a word processor that doesn't have a mail merge feature built-in. The problem with many, including Microsoft Word, is that they are sometimes slightly complicated to use. As a Mac user, we're not big fans of complexities. We are used to things just working. Fortunately, Pages (part of iWork) makes it really easy.

The first thing you need to do is create a pre-defined group of contacts in Address Book (to refresh your memory on doing this, click here). For this example, I am sending a thank you letter to a group of people who contributed to the Mac Tip of the Day fund (a fictional fund, of course). So I appropriately named my new Address Book group "Mac Tips".

Now that I have my Address Book group, I will create my document in Pages. Obviously, I will start with "Dear First Last" (where first and last is the person's name, which will be extracted from Address Book). To insert an Address Book field, place the cursor where you want to insert it, then go to Insert | Address Book Field. The Inspector will then automatically switch to the section that allows you to choose the appropriate field,as shown below:

Once you have chosen to insert the first field, repeat the step above to insert as many fields as you need to finish your document. Notice that you can choose from any field available in Address Book, including e-mail address, fax number, AIM account, etc.

Once you have finished your document, it should look no different than as if you just hand-typed the fields. If you want to view the Address Book fields you just inserted, go to View | Show Invisibles (Shift+Command+I). Your document should then look something like this:

Now that your document is complete, it's time to merge with your newly created Address Book group. To do this, simply go to Edit | Merge Address Book Cards... You will see the following prompt:

Simply choose the group from the drop-down list (as I have done for "Mac Tips"), then choose the type of resulting document. As you can see, you can either send the new document directly to the printer, or create a new Pages document with the results. Can't get much easier (or user-intuitive) than this!