Forum Discussion
Email merge from High School Classmates Spreadsheet
have an Excel workbook with High School Class information. Some entries (class members) have email addresses and some do not. I would like to send a personalized email to all those with addresses skipping those who do not. The email will contain information (data fields) from the spreadsheet. (name, address, telephone etc). How do I construct a mailmerge that selects only members with email addresses, skips others, but still extracts data in the sheet from those selected?
Personal information: Last name, First name,Middle Name, Address, City, State, Zip, Phone, Email are in columns A to I as listed.
Not all members have Email addresses so only records with email should be selected, filling in other fields from that record in the merged document.
2 Replies
Use Word’s email mail merge, then filter the recipient list to exclude blank email addresses. The other fields will stay matched to each person’s row.
For desktop Word with classic Outlook on Windows configured to send email:
- Make sure your Excel sheet has one header row and one person per row, then save it. Format ZIP codes and phone numbers as text where needed to preserve leading zeros.
- In Word, choose Mailings > Start Mail Merge > E-mail Messages.
- Select Select Recipients > Use an Existing List, open your workbook, and choose the relevant sheet.
- Open Edit Recipient List > Filter. Set the field to Email and the comparison to Is not blank.
- Write your message and use Insert Merge Field for First name, Address, Phone, and any other fields you need.
- Choose Preview Results and check several recipients.
- Select Finish & Merge > Send E-mail Messages. Set To to Email, enter a subject, and choose HTML.
Word sends a separate personalised message to each selected recipient. Blank-email rows are excluded without deleting them from Excel. Test with a copy of the list containing only your own email address before sending to the class.
Hi Larry,
use your Excel file as is and follow the steps in this article:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/word/mail-merge-using-an-excel-spreadsheetIn step 2 "Mail Merge Recipients" you'll see a note and in there is the link to the sub article
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/word/query-options-filter-dialogSimply filter the data to include only recipients with email addresses. That's it.
Andreas.
