I have used Gammadyne email to send out bulk emails to subscribers, people associated with the Stockholm Challenge etc for about 5 years now. It had a clever, but simple form of mail merge that let me pull names, other information and email addresses out of a csv file, merge them into an HTML body and send them.
Simple. In the recipients (logical) tool you browse to the desired csv file and double click. Then you enter the desired column headers in the HTML document surrounded by [[and]] then you send the emails.
The new version can do all sorts of wonderful stuff, with many variables and many clever programming tricks. But it wont allow me to do the simple merge that I used to. It has all the information about the simple merge and uses the same interface to set up the data file etc, but it doesn't work, keeps telling me that the merge names are illegal but doesn't tell me how to legalise them. You know, really helpful.
It also tells me that the simple merge is disabled, but has no instructions for enabling it. None. Zip. Do a search in the help file (help! Hah!) for simple merge and nowhere does it tell you how to enable or disable, nowhere.
But it does tell me that I can only use certain column headers, so I switch the names of all the column headers to approved names. Gammadyne then promptly ignores all but two of them. Two, of seven, work perfectly, the rest are not objected to, but the contents of the fields to which they refer are ignored. Yeah, that'll please the customers, not even an error message now.
Oh, wait, I can register the xls as a database to use for the source, great. Instructions tell me how to do it. So I do. No sign of it in the system. Wait, more instructions.
Excel Table Names
You will probably not be able to choose an Excel table from the drop down list. You will need to enter it manually, but in a special format required by Excel. Excel requires that table names end with a dollar sign and be surrounded by accent characters. The accent character key is usually above the Tab key, next to the "1" key. Here is an example of a proper Excel table name:`sheet1$`
Good luck with finding out how to do that in Open office though. Zero progress, another half hour ticks by.
A useful tool has become too clever, too smart for this guy to use.
If I had the programming skills it now apparently requires, I wouldn't have needed the thing in the first place. If its creators remembered that it was designed originally for basic users to be able to smooth out some basic operations, they might have left it working in a way that I could use it. Instead they decided to improve it.
Like cellphones that now do everything including make the tea, but actually most of us use them almost all the time to make calls and send sms and maybe, just maybe, take a photo and email it. There's a level of elaboration that we Just Don't Need.
Gammadyne appears to have forgotten. So it gets the flick. Too bad, it was good while it lasted.
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