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

what about mac. how to add this tool in mac?

Answer 3

Sorry,  I personnally do not have the ability to do that.  I had offered the source code for my application to the Mac people, but no one took me up on the offer (I think that they have enought problems getting their own applications to run on a Mac without taking on anything else).

Answer 4

I wish I had enough time to ponder this for you. It appears you might be able to build an AppleScript to do this for you. Add attachment is available in AppleScript, as evidenced by this Automator workflow

You'd have to figure out a lot of the details, though.

Answer 5

Sorry,  I personnally do not have the ability to do that.  I had offered the source code for my application to the Mac people, but no one took me up on the offer (I think that they have enought problems getting their own applications to run on a Mac without taking on anything else).

The problem is they pulled another Office 2008 where they wait a year or two, too late to rebuild VBA/VBE on 2016. They ripped it to shreds, and there is only stump or stub left and enough code where they can say the Mac version has VBA. Rich Michaels has updated that Microsoft  Swears they are working on a rebuild where it would be compatible with the PC version (except Active-X isn't available on Apple products my comment here).  But they have not committed as to when it will be ready. Who knows six months, six years, Sixty years. They just say they are working on it.  So if you code had used Active-X, it wouldn't have worked anyway.  I recently found out the Mac can't create a Content control like on PC; it will now work with Content control created on a PC.

I can't figure why something that is supposed to be so easy to design that a school student can write working VBA code, why engineers that paid thousands of Dollars can't fix it to work on a Mac. I've never used UNIX but my understand it's not that complex and the MacOS is built using FreeBSD Unix as part of the system the finder UI on top, and the middle is Mach Kernal.  As for why the Mac engineers at Microsoft wouldn't take you up on your code. They were probably embarrassed and arrogant. Accept you contribution.

Sometimes things that Microsoft does makes me wish that Corel would bring back WordPerfect back to Mac. 

_________

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