Many to one mailmerge aka Manager mail merge
Sometime it’s nessessary to email an individual about multiple people. Sometimes, its nessessary to email loads of people about loads of people.
I needed a way to email managers about staff in their team who were recieving new equipment. As this was multiple people in multiple teams with multiple managers it was a bit out of the scope of what mailmerge is designed to handle.
The script takes a “source.csv” layed out like this:
| ID | Name | Device | ManagerID | ManagerName | ManagerEmail |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1001 | Joe Bloggs | iPhone 6 | 2001 | A | [email protected] |
| 1002 | Steve Jones | iPhone 5 | 2001 | A | [email protected] |
| 1003 | Dan Smith | iPhone 6 | 2002 | B | [email protected] |
For each unique manager in this list (“A” and “B”) a new email will be created based on an html template “_template.htm”. addressed to the manager and containing a formatted table with their staff.
Using the table above, manager “A” will recieve and email about employees 1001 & 1002, and manager “B” about employee 1003.
Setup
- Edit the “_template.html” file in MS Word (to retain the formatting)
- Edit/replace the “sourcedata.csv” file, retaining the headers
- Run the script
- All messages will sit in outlooks “Draft” folder untill ready to send
To Do/Extension
1) Automatic sending The initial usecase for this script need it to be sent by outlook at a given time
2) More options!
3) Inline processing This wasn’t required initially but it might be useful to be able to accept the sourcedata table/object via a pipe or argument