This is a pretty basic question. How do you
automatically send personalized form letters from Word (I
have Word 2000 Professional)to e-mail addresses?
Broadly speaking, you need to set up a mail merge in the usual way
(Tools|Mailmerge) and use the Form Letters merge type. Then when you get to
the point where you are ready to merge, either go into the MailMergeHelper
and select the appropriate destination (Electronic mail) in the Merge
Options, and merge from there, or click on the "merge to e-mail" icon in the
mailmerge toolbar. But there are lots of caveats...
What
changes to the form letter are required.
In Word 2000, merges to e-mail can only be "plain text", in which case
whatever you put in your form letter is reduced to plain text in the body of
the message, or "as an attachment". In the former case,fonts, graphics, etc.
are all lost. In the latter case, there is just an attachment, which should
however contain a complete Word document, more or less as if you have merged
that recipient's output to a new document. But there is no opportunity to
specify any text in the body of the e-mail message at all. Also, in Word
2000 there is no option to output HTML-format emails. There is also no
opportunity to specify the Subject field on a per-recipient basis.
Can the data
source be an Outlook address book
Yes (although the full answer to that may be "it depends on what you think
of as an Outlook Address book"). It is probably best to initiate your merge
from Outlook if you want to be able to use all the data in an Outlook
contacts list - select a contacts folder and use Outlook (2000 and later I
think) Tools|Mail merge. If you have to connect using he method provided in
Word you may have to work a bit harder and a much smaller number of fields
is made available. If the data source is Outlook Express's address book, you
have to export the data to a delimited file and use that as the data source.
Yes, assuming you mean a Word document with nothing (much) except a table.
Finally, a lot of people encounter problems where the Electronic mail/merge
to email options are not present or greyed out. Typically if you are
e-mailing via Outlook or OE, this can be fixed (you may be able to search
this newsgroup for suggestions).
