Hi, I am looking to automate a daily process to pull in contacts from a CSV (that sits at a fixed URL - or could be imported into google drive if easier?) and then send out an email to them. The CSV will hold only the previous day's new contacts so there would be no need to remove contacts that have already been emailed. We would only need the email address (no first name etc.) if that makes things easier.

Is it possible to automate this process and what do you think we would need (i.e. can we do it off-the-shelf or would we need to get s VBA expert to do some code for us)?



We are using office 365 for our mail and would love the process to all be cloud-based but I'm not sure if a cloud-based mail merge is even possible without automation?

Thanks for any help in advance!

Sorry, I should also have said, we get an email each day with a link to the CSV so this could be set up as an automatic action in response to receiving that mail.

Hi JCInfo

Depending on the URL and how the data are accessed, it may be possible to automate this with a VBScript run (or other executable) from the Windows Task Scheduler. The code would need to:
• start Internet Explorer
• access the website
• download the CSV
• quit Internet Explorer
• start Word
• open the mailmerge document
• connect to the data source
• execute the merge
• close Word
• quit

I have no idea about any Cloud-based processing and have had little involvement with I.E. automation.

IMHO, it would be best to consult a programmer for this. From what you've posted, I doubt it would be a large project.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks Paul - that's really helpful. If I'm looking for a programmer do you think VBA would be the right way to go?
Thanks,

Jennie

Whilst a knowledge of Word VBA would be helpful (for the purposes of automating Word), the coding would need to be done in VBScript (which is different) or another programming language such as VB.Net, etc. Of course, once you're coding, the question arises as to why you'd automate Word to use mailmerge instead of doing the whole job directly. That's something you'll need to work through with your programmer.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]