How To Insert Attachment – From List
As discussed in our earlier tutorials, Mail merge Sutra provide two options to insert attachments. We will discuss how to insert attachments – “From List” in this section
A. INTRODUCTION:
Caution: Before you start, please note that your Mail merge sheet should contain “Attachment1” & “Attachment2” as column headers in order to insert attachments (both columns, without spaces and not case sensitive).
As a part of better control, we by default add these headers in 1st step when you create Mail Merge Template. Hence we advise not to delete these columns. All attachment links will be inserted in these columns based on your selections which we discuss below.
From list:
This option is suitable if you want to send personalised attachment to every recipient i.e different attachment to different recipients
Firstly upload all your files in a folder in google drive.
In your mail merge sheet, list the corresponding file names for each email recipient under any additional column. You can freely add any column heading under which file names can be mentioned. In our below reference we will use “File Names” as our column
Caution: The filenames should be entered without extension (e.g. pdf ,doc). Also filenames are case sensitive and should match exactly with the source filenames. If filenames mentioned here have extra/missing spaces and other characters, then no files will be inserted.
Once this is done, you are now ready to select parameters based on requirements.Follow the steps as mentioned in our next article.
B. STEPS FOR INSERTING ATTACHMENTS – FROM LIST:
For inserting attachments – “From List” click Mail Merge> Mail Merge> Attachments>From List
1) Once you click “From List”, a new window will open. Select the folder in which all files are stored. Click Select Folder
Caution: If no folder is selected, individual files in main google folder will be considered while inserting attachments
2) Choose Folder (do not double click) and click select
3) Choose Identifier column (mandatory field).
Please select the column where you have mentioned corresponding file names. MM Sutra will match these exact file names in the selected google drive folder for inserting attachments
Remember: Blank headers in 1st row will not be shown. This is a check within our tool to avoid conflicts arising due to blank headings.
In case of duplicate headings, Mail merge sutra will consider column header which appears first. Hence we advise not to keep duplicate headings if possible.
4) Select Extension (mandatory field)
In this step please select the extension type of the file to be inserted. This is required to identify which file needs to be considered while inserting attachments since there will be instances where there are file names with same names but with different extensions.
Note: If there are same file names with extension doc/docx, then file which appears first will be considered. Same treatment applies in case of xls/xlsx and png/jpeg/jpg
5) Choose column to insert attachment (mandatory field)
Select the attachment column where you want to insert attachment link (Attachment1 or Attachment2). Attachment links will be inserted based on your selections here
Click OK and you will now see attachment links from google drive updated in the mail merge sheet based on your above selections
Note:
- Please do not delete the selected files from google drive unless all emails have been processed, else you may not get desired results
- Also note that if file size is 0 kb, it will not be processed.