MS Office: How to Mail Merge Word to Outlook Emails with Different Attachments Using Excel

Can I do a mail merge in Microsoft Word with an attachment, and can the attachment be different for each email?

Yes! If you use a plug-in for Microsoft Word. Office cannot do this by default, but there are plug-ins that can. Below is one example.

To do a mail merge using Microsoft and attachments, you'll have to have 4 things:

1) MS Excel (or maybe Access) to provide rows of recipient names, emails, and attachment filenames.

2) MS Outlook to send the email's through your pre-configured SMTP account.

3) MS Word so you can make an email template, then merge the Excel rows to your attachment, and then send the emails out using Outlook.

4) A plug-in that will allow you to use one of the Excel rows' fields as the attachment.

The plug-in that I tried is called Mail Merge Toolkit and it can be found at MapiLab.com.

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Once you have all of those parts, and the Mail Merge Toolkit installed, you will need to set up your Excel to have a couple of new fields (columns).

You probably will have something like this for columns:

• firstName
• lastName
• emailAddress
• attachmentFilename
• attachmentFolder
• folderAndName

So, it depends on what you're trying to do, but you'll need to keep track of which file is going to whom, and where the file is located on your local computer system.

Perhaps the file is on your local C: drive or maybe it is on a Network drive.

Maybe you're sending only one file or a couple of different files.

Maybe all the files are in one folder, or maybe different folders.

Having 3 columns, like the last 3 above, allows you some flexibility for these situations.

You might want to apply [Format as Table] to your Excel rows, with the first row as headers.

I don't think it really matters what type of file is being attached for Mail Merge Toolkit to work. I tested it with different JPG files of my friends, and it worked fine.

So, a row might look like:

• Jane
• Doe
• jdoe@workitmissthang.com
• jane doe (2).jpg
• C:\myPhotos\potentialClients\
• =CONCATENATE([@attachmentPath],[@attachmentFilename])

The last entry is a formula that stitches together the other two attachment columns.

When you're done, close your Excel file.

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If you installed the Mail Merge Toolkit in Word, make sure you restart Word to see the new feature. There will be a menu on the [Mailings] tab for "Mail Merge Toolkit."

• So, type up your form letter, save it. 
• Choose [Mailings] > Select Recipients > Use an Existing List... 
• Find your data source (Excel spreadsheet), and hit [OK].
• Insert the placeholders where you want them (for firstName, lastName, address, business...) using 
• [Mailings] > Insert Merge Field > {your choice of fields}.
• You're going to leave alone the attachment fields, though.
• Save your form letter again.

Now, test this out before you do a real mass mailing.

Okay, when you're ready to send your mail, you'll go to:

[Mailings] > Mail Merge Toolkit > Merge & Send.

You'll see a pop-up menu that looks like this:

See next to "Attach:"? That's where you'll select the field from you data source -- here it's called "folderAndName"

You can enter a Subject line with a customized string. 

Then, when you're ready, you hit [OK].

One more step. You will be asked to choose the account from which you would like to send. Again, this should have already been setup in Outlook, under Outlook > [File] > [Account Settings].

Good luck. Don't do it without running a test first.

MS Excel Charts: Compare two or more different data lines/sets on the same chart

You have an Excel spreadsheet, and you want to make a chart.
But the data is not comparing the way you want it to.
One line looks fine on your chart, and the other one barely registers.

What you want to do is lay one line on top of the other to find a correlation, if one exists.

ex. Comparing number of website Visitors to Pageviews over time.

Visitors
Jan = 100
Feb = 120
Mar = 205
Apr = 135

Pageviews
Jan = 5000
Feb = 4500
Mar = 7350
Apr = 3700

Your chart might look like this:

It's not wrong, but it's not what you wanted.

The Visitors line is too flat to be visually useful.
The problem is that each visitor looks at about 50 pages, and that makes a huge disparity between the two figures -- 100 visitors looked at 5000 pages.

For a more visually significant comparison, you would want one data line layered on top of the other.

You might be thinking that you need to do some kind of percentage conversion. Or maybe change the values to something more similar.... Nope.

What you need to do is split the vertical / y-axis data series.

To do this:

• Decide which numbers you want on the left side column, and which you want on the right.

I'll put Visitors on the left, and Pageviews on the right.

• Right-click on the line you want on the right side data series -- in this case, the red Pageviews line.
• Choose [Format Data Series] from the pop-up menu.
• The menu should default to [Series Options].
• There will be two options: 1) Primary Axis, 2) Secondary Axis.
• Click on [x] Secondary axis.
• The chart will change, and you need to hit [Close].

The new version of your chart should look like this:

Unfortunately, if you make any changes to your type of chart, you may have to do these steps over again.

There only seems to be room for two data series on a chart, so, if you've got 3 or more different, you'll to find a better way.

(Note: If you find a way to color-coordinate the numbers to match the line, or to add a label at the top of each column to specify which is which, please do let me know.)