Tuesday, January 23, 2007

E-mail Merge - The easy way

Lets say you want to send out a whole bunch of standardized e-mails with data provided by an Excel doc. My first solution would be to rig something up using sed, awk, /bin/mail and a .csv dump of the data.

But, as this page shows, it simply doesn't need to be that tricky.

Turns out, Word's Mail Merge functionality (which I haven't used since High School computer class, when Mail Merge was considered slick technology) does e-mail too.

The Word wizard did more or less the right thing - stepping me through creating a template, finding a data source, and sending it off.

One thing to be careful of - when you finally produce your document, Word will send out those hundreds of e-mails on your behalf (via Outlook, of course). It won't just queue them up. So, when you hit that final step, make sure you are ready.

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