My need seemed simple enough.
I had a spreadsheet of e-mail addresses, usernames, and passwords that I’d created for a client’s WordPress site. I needed to take the spreadsheet data and merge the data into an e-mail template. I needed to do this because it seems that WordPress won’t send out registration confirmation e-mails to users who are manually registered by a web site’s administrator, but let’s not get into that as it could be the subject of an entire post on its own.
Lately I’ve been using Google Docs to create spreadsheets and word processing documents at work. I use it so much in fact that I rarely use Microsoft Office anymore. My beef with Microsoft is that their interfaces and workflows leave a lot to be desired. If I can find an easier, more elegant solution to a problem that I’d ordinarily use a Microsoft product for, I’m a happy girl. I keep the applications around to combat any strange conversion issues, but by and large I live a relatively Microsoft-free existence. I’ve been using Gmail exclusively for my personal e-mail, and I’ve even gone so far as to enable Google Docs for this domain. The Google Kool-Aid is tasty and refreshing.
I so trusted the Google engineers and their productivity suite of applications that I just knew that creating an e-mail merge with Google Spreadsheets and Gmail would be easy-peasy.
Not only was it not easy, it’s impossible. At present, this functionality isn’t available in Gmail or Google Docs. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement.
Undaunted, I looked into doing an e-mail merge with Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet application and Apple’s Mail client. While mail can do a rudimentary e-mail merge, the data has to live in Apple’s Address book for the merge to work. I realize Numbers is (severely) lacking in features compared to Excel, but I didn’t expect Apple — the company that embodies elegant and easy computing — to make it so challenging to complete this task.
To use a baseball analogy, I’m at bat with two strikes, the bases loaded, and two outs.
I was feeling sufficiently chastised by this point, so I gave up and launched Excel and Word to create a Mail Merge. Leave it to Microsoft to require a third step in what should be a two step solution - instead of being able to create the merge document in Entourage (Microsoft’s e-mail client for the Mac), I had to first create a spreadsheet in Excel, create a template document in Word, and then complete the merge by sending the finished messages to Entourage.
Take a wild guess as to how this one turned out. Let that graphic above give you a hint.
Apparently, Word and Entourage aren’t on speaking terms, because Word “couldn’t recognize (my) default e-mail program” even though I’d changed my default program from Gmail to Entourage several times. I not only set the preference in Entourage, I opened Mail to make sure that Entourage was declared as the default mail program, but no matter what I tried — cursing, sighing, bargaining with God — I couldn’t get this rasted blasted e-mail merge to work!
Where did that leave me, you ask? It’s simple - I finished the mail merge, generated separate Word documents for each e-mail, and manually crafted each message by cutting and pasting the data into separate messages. I only had about 10 of these to do, but can you imagine what a nightmare scenario this would be if I were dealing with hundreds of e-mail messages?
How do you manage e-mail merges?
