Performing a Mail Merge with Google Spreadsheets & Gmail

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Recently I had the need to email people that had filled out a form for me. Definitely a time intensive job if you are creating the emails individually by hand!

Fortunately, you CAN do a mail merge from data on in a spreadsheet!  Here's how:
  1. Create or open the spreadsheet that contains the data you want to merge into emails, giving each column a heading - make sure the recipients' email address is one of the fields!
  2. Go to the Tools Menu; select Script Gallery
  3. In the pop-up box, type Mail Merge and search - there are MANY mail merge scripts - the one I used the worked very well was called "Yet Another Mail Merge"
  4. Grant permission for it to access your Google Account
  5. After a bit, a new menu item will appear at the top next to Help called Mail Merge
Ok - your spreadsheet is prepared, now you need to prepare your template email.  Type the email up exactly as you want it, leaving the recipient blank.

The key here - any place you want the email to pull information from your spreadsheet enter the column heading on the email with $% before it and % after it.  So, for example, if I want to use "first name" from my spreadsheet, I would put $%first name% in my email for it to use the person's first name

Once you have created the email, you go back to the spreadsheet and run the merge from the script.

If you would like some help, here's a quick video of a sample mail merge I created:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJYbgJoxOWU&feature=youtube_gdata

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