# Sending an email from Microsoft Excel...

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sending-an-email-from-microsoft-excel/464639>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [September 22, 2008, 4:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sending-an-email-from-microsoft-excel/464639 "2008-09-22T04:38:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![aaelghat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c5a1d2/32.png) [@aaelghat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aaelghat)\
**Post date:** [September 22, 2008, 4:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sending-an-email-from-microsoft-excel/464639/1 "2008-09-22T04:38:00Z")

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Hi, I own an online business in which people buy a service that is given to others as a gift.

When people make a purchase, in my shopping cart software I ask them things like the recipient’s name, gender, etc. and I currently copy and paste some of that information into some CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software that I have, which I then use to send a personalized email.

For some other reasons, I have an Excel spreadsheet where I make an ODBC connection to my shopping cart software and each order becomes a row in the spreadsheet.

What I’d like to do is send out the personalized email using the Excel spreadsheet instead. I would basically want to “mail merge” some of the information that I download into the spreadsheet (like the recipient name) to some standard formatted email text thet I have.

Just to be clear, I don’t want to mail-merge the whole spreadsheet, just an individual row at a time as I get new orders.

I’m willing to write some VBA code. Any ideas or places to start? Thanks

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**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\
**Post date:** [September 22, 2008, 2:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sending-an-email-from-microsoft-excel/464639/2 "2008-09-22T14:41:50Z")

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I have done something like this but I don’t have the file on this computer. Excel VBA has a sendmail method, but that allows you to just send a workbook as an attachment. You can’t do what you want with that. IIRC I used VBA to call methods in Outlook. Also IIRC Excel doesn’t have a built-in SMTP client; this works because Outlook also supports VBA. If you wanted to use some other mail client I don’t know if it’s possible.

You might Googling around for “Excel Outlook VBA send email”. I also find [www.ozgrid.com](http://www.ozgrid.com) a great resource for Excel and VBA.

Meantime, when I get home tonight I’ll see if I can find the file where I did this. We had weekly status meetings and would take turns giving presentations on various topics each week. I used Excel to keep track of who was scheduled for what each week and used it to automatically notify people that they were scheduled to give a presentation at a meeting one week in advance. So I know it’s possible.

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**Author:** ![Number](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/number/32/242_2.png) [@Number](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Number)\
**Post date:** [September 23, 2008, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sending-an-email-from-microsoft-excel/464639/3 "2008-09-23T02:38:42Z")

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You might try using the vbscript in [this article](http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/resources/qanda/nov04/hey1129.mspx) as a starting point, though I’m not sure how well it will translate into VBA.