Excel as database for Apple Mail in OS 10.4?

[Hylton Boothroyd]

[Intel MacMini, 10.4.11]

I would be grateful for any broad strategic comments you can offer about
the feasibility/wisdom of using Excel 2004 as the database for selecting
who is to receive a particular email via Apple Mail. These, with Word
2004, are the applications I already use every day.

For letters, I've used mail merge from Excel to Word for several years.
But now I would like to send emails to subsets of up to 80 people out of
200, where the subsets will depend on multiple criteria which are likely
at change with each mailing. This is a once-every-few-weeks requirement
rather than something that needs to be highly automated for daily use.

I'll get quite a lot of what I need just by being able to get a fixed
email message off in bulk.

But once that's in place I'll probably sometimes want to be able to add
data specific to individuals.

The context is that I'm operating at the centre of a network of local
voluntary groups where key others use Word and Excel, which more or less
requires me to us Excel for the database.

Is it mad to hope that I can mix Microsoft and Apple in this way?

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

[Intel MacMini, 10.4.11]

I would be grateful for any broad strategic comments you can offer about
the feasibility/wisdom of using Excel 2004 as the database for selecting
who is to receive a particular email via Apple Mail. These, with Word
2004, are the applications I already use every day.

For letters, I've used mail merge from Excel to Word for several years.
But now I would like to send emails to subsets of up to 80 people out of
200, where the subsets will depend on multiple criteria which are likely
at change with each mailing. This is a once-every-few-weeks requirement
rather than something that needs to be highly automated for daily use.

I'll get quite a lot of what I need just by being able to get a fixed
email message off in bulk.

But once that's in place I'll probably sometimes want to be able to add
data specific to individuals.

The context is that I'm operating at the centre of a network of local
voluntary groups where key others use Word and Excel, which more or less
requires me to us Excel for the database.

Is it mad to hope that I can mix Microsoft and Apple in this way?

I have no idea about Mail, I never use it. But, mail merge in Word allows
you to set some criteria for selecting the input source. If this is not
sufficient, you could use a filtered list in Excel, and then copy the list
to another workbook, and use that for the data source.