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

Jim, 

I compose my message in Microsoft Word, and using mail merge option, I want to have that message displayed in the message body of an email using Outlook and also attach another file (like a pdf or ppt or xls) to the message before sending using Mail Merge?

I can do that using thunderbird, but thats damn slow, with attachments, if if the size of the attachment isn't too big (less than 1MB)

Answer 3

Dang! Someone just posted an answer that works to this question in a different thread. I'll keep my eyes open and will reply back when I discover that one.

Answer 4

I don't know if the method detailed in the article "Mail Merge to E-mail with Attachments" at:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MailMerge/MergeWithAttachments.htm

can be adapted to work on a Mac.

If you were using Windows, you could use the Merge with Attachments facility on my Merge Tools Add-in.

You can download the MERGE TOOLS ADD-IN.zip file from the following page of my One Drive:

http://bit.ly/1hduSCB

Then extract the files from the archive and read

“READ ME – Setting up and using the Merge Tools Add-in.docx

to see how to install and use the various tools. 

Using those tools, it is possible to perform the following types of merge that cannot be done with Mail Merge “out-of-the-box”:

• Merge to e-mail messages either with or without attachments, with the documents created by the merge being sent as either Word or PDF attachments or as the body of the e-mail message.
• Merge to individual documents in either Word or PDF format with the filenames being supplied by the data in one of the fields in the data source
• Many to One type merges, which can be used for creating documents such as invoices where there are multiple records in the data source that have common data in one of the fields
• Merging to a document that will include a chart that is unique to each record in the data source
• Merging a document with Content Controls
• Merging a document that contains Legacy FormFields
• Duplex Merges
• Merging to a printer that will collate and staple the output created from each record in the data source.

I haven't heard of anyone successfully using that on a Mac, but if a Mac VBA person wants to try and get it working on a Mac, if you contact me, I will let you have a copy of the source code.

Answer 5

That's good, Doug, but Outlook on the Mac can not be programmed with VBA. You can use JavaScript or AppleScript only.