I'm so pleased with myself I thought I'd share my discovery. I teach a class and twice during the term I email out the test results and class standings to my students. Its usually a standard form letter type that says " your mid term grade is x and your recitation grade is Y". As I was doing this manually last term for a class of about 35 students, it occurred to me that there should be a way to automate it. I told myself that this term I would work on figuring it out. Since I maintain the grades of the class in an Excel spreadsheet, I thought it shouldn't be that difficult to use that as a database and create a mail merge document in Word. Back in the old days of Wordstar (remember that program?) it wasn't that hard to create multiple form letters using the mail merge function. So a little research in Microsoft Word and I found that not only is the mail merge function built in to the program, but it also had a 'merge to email' option that outputs directly into your Entourage outbox for emailing. The Data Merge Manager under tools makes it a painless process in Word. What used to be a manual process of cutting and pasting grades into an email is now a 5 minute automated breeze! If you need to send out form letters by email, this is a wonderful tool. And everything is built into Microsoft Office. And surprise surprise, it actually works well. I am a happy camper!
Thanks for the wonderful tip! Does this merge to email work only for MS Entourage or can it work with Apple Mail as well?
Only works with Entourage and you have to configure it as your default email client. Use the office help for a step by step walk through of how to set it up and use the mail merge function
