You find out a letter merge went wrong when a donor calls to ask why her thank-you says “Dear ,” or lists a gift amount of 250 with no dollar sign. By then two hundred copies are already in the mail. The fix is to look at real merged letters before anything prints, and Altru doesn’t make that as obvious as it could.
This guide explains why previewing is awkward, then gives you three ways to see finished letters with real data before you commit to a full run.
Why there’s no simple “preview” button
Altru letters are built from two pieces that only meet at the end. One piece is the Word template, which holds your wording and the merge fields. The other is the data: the list of constituents, plus the fields an export pulls for each one (name, addressee, salutation, gift amount, membership level, and so on). The merged letter doesn’t exist until those two are combined, usually in Microsoft Word.
So inside Altru you can see the template, and you can see the people in your selection, but you generally can’t see what one finished letter looks like for one specific person. We aren’t aware of a native, in-browser merged preview. If you think your version offers one, check with Blackbaud support or try it in a sandbox before you build a process around it.
The practical answer is to preview in Word, using a small, deliberate test run.
Option 1: Preview the full output in Word
Once Altru has generated the merge data, Word does the actual previewing. In Word’s Mailings tab, Preview Results shows each merged letter one record at a time, and you can step forward and back through the list. Find Recipient lets you jump straight to a constituent you already know has messy data.
Before you print, scroll through at least:
- The first and last few records
- One household or joint record
- One organization record, if your selection includes any
- One record with an unusual address (international, apartment number, long street name)
- The largest and smallest gift or membership amounts
For a big batch, finish the merge to a new document (Word’s option to edit individual documents) instead of sending it to the printer. That gives you every letter in one file you can search, which is the fastest way to find a stray “Dear ,” across hundreds of letters. Word’s Check for Errors can also flag merge fields that don’t match the data source.
Option 2: Run a small test group first
For a new or edited template, don’t preview against the whole list. Build a small selection or query that returns just a few known records, and generate the letter for those people only.
A good test group has three to five records you’ve chosen on purpose:
- A clean individual with every field filled in
- A household, to check joint addressee and salutation formats
- Someone with no salutation or a missing address line
- An anonymous or “do not acknowledge” donor, if the letter is a gift acknowledgment
- A staff member’s own record, so you can mail one copy to yourself and see the real envelope
One caution for acknowledgments: generating letters may mark the gifts as acknowledged, depending on how your process is set up. Check how your acknowledgment process handles this before running a test against real gifts. If you can’t confirm it, test in a sandbox or use a test constituent with a test gift.
Option 3: Keep permanent test constituents
Many admins keep a few fake constituent records just for testing. Give them obvious names like “Test Member Household” and fill them in to match the edge cases above. Code or flag them so they’re left out of real mailings, reports, and counts.
Then every template change gets the same check: run the letter against the test records, preview in Word, and compare the results to last time. It takes five minutes, and you’ll catch problems before anyone else does.
What usually breaks in a merge
When the preview looks wrong, it’s almost always one of these:
- Blank salutations or addressees. The record has no name format the export expects. Fix the record or add a fallback in the template, and look at how your name format defaults are set.
- Field shows the wrong thing or nothing at all. The merge field name in Word no longer matches a field in the export. This often happens after someone renames or removes an output field.
- Amounts and dates look raw. Word controls the formatting, not Altru. Word’s field switches (for example, a numeric switch for currency or a date switch for “October 31, 2026”) fix this in the template.
- Extra blank lines in addresses. Empty address lines merge as empty paragraphs. Word’s address block or conditional fields can suppress them.
- Wrong people in the list. That’s a selection problem, not a template problem. Check the record count against what you expected before you even open Word.
A short routine that works
Write down a routine and keep it with the template so anyone on the team can run it:
- Confirm the selection count looks right.
- Generate for the test records and preview in Word.
- Generate the full run and merge to a new document, not straight to the printer.
- Search the merged document for leftovers like “Dear ,”, “«”, or doubled spaces.
- Spot-check five random letters, then print.
It isn’t a one-click preview, but it’s dependable, and it means the first person to read a broken letter is someone on your staff.
Quick answers
Can I see a merged letter for one constituent without running the whole batch?
Yes. Point the letter at a selection that contains only that constituent (or a few test records), then preview the result in Word.
Why does my preview look fine in Word but print differently?
Check printer margins, paper size, and whether you previewed the template or the merged document. Merging to a new document first and printing that file avoids most surprises.
