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General discussion

Generate emails from excel spreadsheet

Jun 8, 2010 2:06AM PDT

I am looking to automate a process, at least minimally. I generate a report that comes in an excel spreadsheet, and I have to email certain lines of the spreadsheet to certain people with a block of text. For example, line 2 will go to one person, lines 3-8 will go to another, lines 9-11 will go to a third, etc. There will be anywhere from 1 to hundreds of lines going to any given person, and the persons name is on each individual line. I have a manual process for this, but it will take me a week or more to make it through the 3600+ lines on this report, and I would like to get through it a little quicker if possible.

I already use a text replacement program, but it is difficult to automate some of the process this way, such as specifying a recipient based on clipboard data, etc. Heck, if there is a third party app I could use to perform automate this function, that would do.

This is in Office 2003, BTW. I have looked into mail merge, but I am not sure if this is the right approach or not.

Any ideas?

TT

Discussion is locked

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Do you write code?
Jun 8, 2010 2:12AM PDT

This sounds like something you would write a small app for. Emailing from code is well covered so nothing to write about there. After that it's just a matter of parsing to some email this software.

Not an offer to write this for free but this from Excel would have us write code.
Bob

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Coding?
Jun 8, 2010 2:37AM PDT

I suppose so, but I was hoping something already existed. My job does not pay me to write code (sadly). I would have to do most of it in my free time, but even that is at a premium these days. Thus looking for something already in existence.

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Job?
Jun 8, 2010 2:46AM PDT

Ahh, let's say this is for work. They pay by the hour so only a terrible manager would leave such things to be done manually. Which means that if you did code it up and bring the hours down then you wouldn't make as much money?

Maybe this is best. Let them pay for not making an app to do this.

And no, I can safely bet this has not been written. I can write that apps that help you do this have been but all have you write scripts or "code" to get to your final emails. Just like mail merge. Mail merge is actually a script and you can alter it to fit.
Bob