We've been doing a trial for an internal snack sales system because we've been unsatisfied with the snack food vendors we've used. It's a lot of work to manually create invoices for this and e-mail them to people based on the maintained spreadsheet though. Short of writing a custom piece of separate software, does the functionality exist in office such that you could write a script to generate e-mails that pull info from the spreadsheet (name, e-mail, amount owed, etc) to act as invoices for people and e-mail them out?

Possible? Yes.  But, any IT guy worth his salt is going to whack you with a stick for thinking of it.

 

It shouldn't be that hard to do, but not necessarily pretty.

MSWord knows how to do the mass mailing part.  The spreadsheet can be used as an ODBC database data source.

Thanks for the suggestion. I should have considered that maybe there was some sort of readily available and affordable accounting software like that that could be used and asked for suggestions.

Yeah I saw that MSWord had some kind of mail merge function and might have been able to do it but was unsure if/how it could work with an excel file to do a mailing.

Unless I am missing something, it should be simple to do using MS-word mail merge and a source spreadsheet.

I'd still consider it a bandaid, though.  The poster who mentioned Quickbooks above is not an idiot.

The mail merge wizard is not bad at all.  You link a source sheet, select source fields, etc.  The wizard is designed for basic tasks, but mail merge will generally let you insert fields however and wherever you wish from a single source spreadsheet.  It might let you do multiples, but I have no idea.

I've created mass mailings with all kinds of information including envelopes, letters and quotes from spreadsheets.  

The bottom line, though, is you are usually jerry rigging something done better and more efficiently by another piece of software.  At least in my experience.