Mail merge with attachment on Macbook using Word + Excel + Outlook 2016

Question

I use Mail merge on my Macbook using Word + Excel + Outlook 2016. However I can't understand how to send emails with attachment using the mail merge feature. 

I have seen clarification tutorials on how to send the attachments in outlook 2011 version using C:\location\filenmane.xls to be mentioned against each mail merge contact, but even thats not very easy to define in macbook, its not easy to define the file location in macbook as we can define in conventional windows platform.

I am aware that it can be done through mozilla thunderbird add-on, but I don't want to download and add more complexity, as my Mac runs on 128 GB space and always remain tight on space..

Answer 1

Doug,

I had a look at doing something like this a couple of years ago. There are a number of things on Windows that are either at least different or significantly harder on Mac so there are potentially a lot of new problems to solve. I haven't looked at your code but for example

 a. there is no reliable documentation for Mac Office VBA or Mac Office Applescript. Many things are the same, some things are missing or different, and some things look the same but are different or behave differently.

 b. it is not even possible to look at the Word object documentation via the Mac Word 2016 VBA editor, because that option does not exist. So although so far I have found that using the equivalent feature in Mac Word 2011 gives the right informaiton, only experiment can verify that new features have not been added and that behaviour remains the same.

 c. you can only really control Mac Outlook via Applescript or by using a Javascript Addin (as mentioned by Jim Gordon).

 d. Even doing a one-merge-at-a-time mailmerge has to be done differently because the object model on Mac Word is like an older version of the Windows one

 e. AFAIK the only reasonably simple way to access Excel data is via the object model (there is no ADO, DAO, OLE DB and using ODBC requires a commercial third-party add-on). IME controlling Excel reliably via Automation is not as easy on Mac.

I'm not saying it can't be done. What I'm saying is that there's a lot to discover, deal with, and make robust. And then there's the support...

But having a bunch of VBA code as a starting point would certainly make a huge difference, and I would certainly be willing to have a crack at a re-working if you are willing to share the code.

Answer 2

Hi Vikrant,

I am not quite sure exactly which scenario you are attempting to accomplish. 

Do you want to compose a Microsoft Word document and send it as an attachment using Mail Merge?

or

Do you want to compose a message in Microsoft Word, have that message display in the message body of an email and also attach another file to the message before sending using Mail Merge?

Answer 3

This one, this one! I'm not Vikrant, but I'm experiencing this issue right now. If I need to imbed a code somewhere fine - but just tell me where to go to enter it. I plan on sending myself a test email.