Outlook/Excel Mail Merge

[sahra-t]

At work, I have been asked to create a system whereby we have an Excel spreadsheet with two columns, the first containing the name of a client and the corresponding column containing their email address. (This part is, obviously, fine)

From this spreadsheet my boss then wants it to be possible to send emails en masse, by inputting their full name in the "To" field, and Outlook sending emails to their email address, as contained in the spreadsheet. Further to this, client confidentiality is important so it would have to be BCC'ed. I have a feeling we would need to involve Microsoft Word here as a kind of 'middle-man' and use the Word Mail Merge feature, but I am still unsure as to how to go about this whole operation. Can someone start me off?

p.s. I thought maybe I could import clients from the Excel spreadsheet I made but some things occurred to me:
1. When clients changed their email address, would we need to re-import every time?
2. There would be a lot of clients, is there a maximum to the number of contacts you can have?
3. There are already people in the Outlook address book to whom we would not want to send our client-intended en masse emails. Is it possible to create a kind of sub-contact list?

[Sidewinder]

VBScript can send emails as a standalone module and can read Excel workbooks eliminating any need to import the names and addresses to keep them in sync.

You could also write a VBA macro in either Outlook or Excel.  If you get Word involved the easiest way would be to record the macro and make changes as needed. Recording macros usually does not produce the most streamlined code.

Good luck.  8-)

[soybean]

1. When clients changed their email address, would we need to re-import every time?

Either that, or just update Excel and Outlook separately if such changes seldom occur.

2. There would be a lot of clients, is there a maximum to the number of contacts you can have?  

No.

3. There are already people in the Outlook address book to whom we would not want to send our client-intended en masse emails. Is it possible to create a kind of sub-contact list?

Yes.  Here's an online tutorial that should be helpful: http://office.microsoft.com/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC011036431033

[sahra-t]

Okay, thanks so far. If there's no maximum to the number of contacts, I'm currently looking to just use the Outlook contacts feature and make our clients a distribution group. However I know that when I put this to my boss he's going to ask how all of us on the network can have this contact list. When I go to File -> Share (Outlook 2000   and click on Contacts I get "The command is not available. See the program documentation about how to use this extension."

The second thing I tried was to save my distribution list, as a .txt file. I then went to "Import" -> From another program or file -> Tab separated values.

I went to another computer on the network and imported the contacts, which was fine, but I was only able to import them into that computer's "Contacts" folder, and not as a separate sub-folder of "Clients" or as a distribution list as I had had it on my machine. So again the other users would have the problem of not being able to select all the clients to send an email to, and the only way would seem to be brute force of individually selecting each contact which is obviously time consuming, or asking for it to always be done from my machine.

Sorry to ask- but, any further thoughts?

[soybean]

From a page in the online tutorial to which I posted a link in my previous post: "If you use Microsoft Exchange Server, you could share your Contacts folder with your coworkers." You need to have Microsoft Exchange Server installed in order to share Contacts or Calender in Outlook.

To get your Contacts copied over to other computers, I believe exporting to a .PST file instead of a .txt file will work better.  In other words, I believe exporting to a .PST file and then importing that file on another computer will allow carrying the folders over to the other computer and not simply import all Contacts into the Contacts folder.  

To export to a .PST file, go to File, Import and Export, select Export to a file, select Personal Folder File (.pst), click Next, expand the Contacts folder by clicking on the plus sign next to it, select the specific folder in the Contacts, and complete export.  Then, import that into other computers.

I'm not absolutely sure but I believe exporting to .PST will also allow you to carry Distribution Lists over.