Mail Merge Me!

Personalised emails are as easy as 1, 2, merge! So how does Vodacom, Outsurance, the NMMM, and countless other companies manage to send personalised letters and emails out to their clients without having some poor office worker sit and type each letter individually? Well, it really is very simple. But first the Agenda

• Take Register


• Welcome Sarah


• Lesson


• Competition

New Member

Sarah (in line with internet safety and privacy guidelines, I do not publish learners' last names online) joined our computer club as from tonight. She is yet another smiling paw paw amongst all the other smiling faces. Welcome Sarah! We are sure you will enjoy hanging and learning with us.

Lesson

This lesson was quite involved, yet easy. We used three applications (MS Word, MS Excel, and MS Outlook) to achieve our goal. A list of "customers" was created using Excel which acted as our database. We recorded the following details for each of our 20 customers: name; surname; email address; favourite colour, and best friend. Then we used Word to create a standard email with a common message to all of these people, being careful to leave out the variables. We then set about inserting fields into our email message where the data from our database were used later. Lastly we completed the mail merge by instructing Outlook to send the common message to all the recipients addressing them by name and mentioning their favourite colour and best friend's name. I know, it sounds complicated but ask the computer club members its actually really easy.

Competition

So after the hard work we had to have some fun too (whilst still learning of course). I must give credit to a man named Larry Ferlazzo who listed the websites we used tonight on his blog as being two of his top ten educational online games. The first one we looked at was Mia Cadaver's Tombstone Timeout. Relax moms. The name sounds quite horrible but the game is really very innocent and totally easy on the stomach. It works like this. We create an online space (kind of like a chat room) where only us - the computer club members - can gain access and compete against each other in either a Mathematics, English, or Science category. Mia Cadaver allows a certain amount of time for one to answer the question. Everyone sees the same question on their own computer screen at the same time. Time's up! Then a ranking is displayed with of who answered the question correctly and in the shortest time before Mia Cadaver asks the next question. It was great fun. Since the website is in English I made it fair by choosing the highest ranking English speaking club member (Amy E) and the highest ranking Afrikaans speaking club member (Willem-Adriaan). I hid something in one of my hands and had the two choose. As you can see from the first photograph on this blog post, Willem-Adriaan chose the correct hand. He won himself a large Easter Bunny courtesy of our friendly Sunridge SuperSpar. The photograph of Willem-Adriaan and myself with the prize is not me handing it over to him ...it's me trying to hang on to the prize (my mouth was watering for that chocolate). ;-) The other game we looked at was Viral Vinnie's Gut Instinct. (Yes, I really don't know where they get these names from). Viral Vinnie works exactly the same as Mia Cadaver. They just look different but is just as much fun as you can see from the photograph on the right over here. You can check out the games for yourself by clicking on these links:

• Mia Cadaver's Tombstone Timeout


• Viral Vinnie's Gut Instinct

A word of warning though. Don't play these at work as they are rather addictive as I found out when I prepared tonight's lesson. But, if you do, be sure to turn your sound all the way down if you don't want to be blamed for some embarrassing sounds (Viral Vinnie). :-)

Diary

It looks like our next club meeting will be on Monday, 18 April 2011. I am not entirely sure with all the public holidays in April but I'll keep you informed in the new term.

Thank you

Thank you to Sunridge SuperSpar for sponsoring the Easter bunny. And of course, thank you to all our dedicated parents who do a fantastic job of dropping our learners off on time and collecting them again afterwards. It really is appreciated. Enjoy the April holiday!

Until next time.