Forum Discussion
Mail Merge to Email Addresses
Need some help. I am using Excel as a data source and created word document templets for mail merging. With in the data source I have for columns for entering email addresses.
Personal Email address
Work Email Address
Supervisor Email Address
Section Email Address
Combined Email Address
When I need to send an email to an individual that also needs to go out to all the emails, I have joined the email addresses together using the following formula and have the combined email addresses in a column called Combined.
=LET(email,TEXTJOIN("; ",TRUE,T3:U3,AS3:AT3),IF(email="","",HYPERLINK("mailto:"&email,email)))
This works with no issues and am able to click on a combined email line and it launches the email program and drops the line of EMAIL ADDRESSES into the email TO: location.
The issue I need help with, if possible, is the interaction with the combined email and word mail merge. When I try to do the mail merge and select the Combined Email Address column, word gives me an error,
"Microsoft Outlook does not recognize " the list of combined email addresses".
Is there a way for outlook to recognize the combined email addresses during the merge?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Carl
Mail merge to email does not recognize multiple email addresses.
A workaround is to create a data source with a record (row) for each email address.
- Carl_61Iron Contributor
Thanks for the idea. I am just not tracking on what you are saying nor how that works. I guess I'm kind a lost with this idea.
Can you offer me a better idea or an example of what you are saying
Carl
From original layout:
to a layout suitable for mail merge to email:
With more columns, of course.
- Carl_61Iron Contributor
I was hoping for a different result but I get it. I currently have individual records with individual email addresses for emails I stated here in. This gives me 4 separate columns plus the combined column of email addresses. I am doing a mail merge to all the personal emails, then a merge to work emails and so on. Is this what you are saying as the work around? It would be nice if this functionality was part of a future version.
Carl
Using 4 separate mail merges is one option.
Another is to use formulas to return as many copies of a row as non-empty email addresses in that row, and populate one column with those email addresses. So for example if the original source has a private email address and a work email address, you'd create two copies of the row, with the personal address in one row and the work address in the other.
But I guess that 4 mail merge runs is easier in the end.