You catch the sun peeking through the trees. The leaves beckon with the breath of spring air. The sailboats dipping down by the dock. The golden retriever digging a muddy trench. That shopping list, then –
Your boss. How dare he? With that Cheshire cat of a smile, no less. “I need this done by end of day. Don’t worry. It shouldn’t take you more than an hour.”
His whistle trails off down the hallway, he probably twirling the keys of his Mercedes in the other finger, until the hum of your computer drowns it out.
You look at his request, the clock, then his request again. A mailing for sixty people, three of which require a little more TLC, who knows why. It is three o’clock in the afternoon on a Friday. You loosen the collar on your shirt.
So you know how to do a mailing. That’s what copy-paste is for, right? A couple times is no sweat. Twenty or thirty times, though? You need to check back in. Maybe the computer could do that. Perhaps it already does.
Sally, the go-to, knew it. Showed you once. You had to look over her shoulder while she fought the urge to chew on a cigarette. Go to this menu (nevermind the amazon page) then click on this option, choose this and . . . please don’t ask, m’kay?
Except she is on leave now. You aren’t sure about trying her method again. It burned through a week’s worth of toner. Luckily, your boss never found out; you buried it with the morning pick up and brute-forced your way through the morning with copy-paste. Glazed eyes. Sore wrists.
Your words are meant to move, not the other way around. If you wanted the computer’s help, you need to help it understand what you want it to do. Where your message contains words, grammar, and intention, a computer sees classes, fields, and variables. This metadata is the structure that tells the computer what to repeat, where to repeat it, and how often.
For example, the business card on your desk is from Dani Martinez. This card contains everything it needs to repeat. Let’s go ahead and translate the words here.
| Keywords: | Metadata: |
| Dani | <<FirstName>> |
| Martinez | <<LastName>> |
| 123 Anywhere St | <<Company>> |
| Any City | <<City>> |
| ##### | <<Zip>> |
Now that you and the computer agree, save the lexicon to a spreadsheet as a comma-separate file (.csv). On the ribbon, go to the mailings tab, find the mail merge option, choose your document type, then let the computer know you are using an existing list.
You should be able to preview the result now. You can even fine tune some of the output before proceeding. If at any point you see an error message, the computer is telling you that it ran into a problem. Acknowledging it might let it move forward, but if the final product looks erroneously different or nonexistent, that means the structure failed. Your handshake with the computer isn’t complete. If you do it right, the computer is swift. Every item in the print run appears as intended. After a couple times, it stops being intimidating.
There. Your boss might really have been right after all. Now about the wolverine of a printer outside your office door, that. . . you might want to call a professional.