Tips, tricks, tools, and techniques for Microsoft Office

With more and more business correspondence being done by e-mail, it was only a matter of time before someone created an inexpensive mail merge program that could generate personalized e-mail messages to a list of contacts.

"Before" (Click to enlarge)

eMailMerge, from Standss (South Pacific) Limited, is a wizard-driven add-in for Outlook (but not Outlook Express) that allows you to insert data fields from your Outlook Contacts list directly into the subject or body of an e-mail message. This capability is provided by a small toolbar that is added to your existing Outlook interface and if you have ever struggled with Word’s mail merge function, you will definitely appreciate eMailMerge’s simplicity and ease-of-use.

Once you finish composing a message, simply click the E-Mail Merge button on the new toolbar to initiate the Wizard, which helps you select recipients and organize categories of contacts for future mailings. The Wizard even lets you specify default values for name and address fields in case some of your contact records are missing this information. For example, if your e-mail message begins with the line:

Dear [FirstName]:

"After" (Click to enlarge)

you can instruct eMailMerge to insert the phrase “Product Manager” into the message if the First Name field of a contact record is blank. (The accompanying screen shots show “before and after” images of a sample e-mail message.)

Although the authors state that eMailMerge only works with Outlook 2000 and 2002, I also tested it with Outlook 2003 Beta and it performed flawlessly.

A free trial version of eMailMerge is available for download from the Web at (http://www.addins4outlook.com) The regular price of the add-in is $39.95. This is one of those utilities that is really worth having -- and it may be the only product on your PC that was written in Fiji!

-- Dick Archer

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