Real World Computing

This is probably a bit of an "oldie" but I have been asked about it a lot recently, so I figured it was worth documenting.  Why would you use this? There's a few reasons why you might need to do an email mail merge. You've got an email that you've got to send to a few people, perhaps it's an invoice or just a seasonal greeting. Whatever it is, you don't have a group to send it to and you don't feel like just pasting everyone's email address into the BCC field. You need to reference specific pieces of data in your email -- data attached to an individual. For example, on an invoice reminder run, you might have a due date, an invoice number, an amount and a project code.  The Procedure 1. Create an Excel Spreadsheet with your people's details in it.  You should use the first line to have column headings like Name, Email and FirstName.  You only really need name and email but if you want to refer to other things (eg: like th...

We have a lot of documents and they go back several decades. Many of them  are still relevant today, even if they're only background to current projects. The problem is that Word doesn't like its own file formats. It won't open documents created with versions of Word earlier than 1997 and it crashes with anything saved as .DOC which contains macros.  There's some solutions to these problems though; Opening Older Documents It's possible to change Word 2016's settings to allow you to open old documents; Click File,  Then Options Then Trust Center Click on the button marked Trust Center Settings Click on File Block settings. UN Tick the document types that you want to be able to open and click Ok Of course, just because you CAN, doesn't mean that you should. Word is less stable with these settings turned on, and it's able to open documents which could be potentially dangerous.  If you're looking at your company's archives t...