If you went school in the ’90s/’00s in the UK, one of the few things you were probably taught under the heading of “ICT” was how to do a mail merge in Microsoft Word.

And to be fair, it is a skill which comes in handy now and then. While the temptation to write a fully automatic invoicing system for my village magazine is strong, there is something to be said for using standard MS Office/Google Docs at the core, to make it easy to hand on to some other sucker in due course.

Which is why, in the year 2024, I do a mail merge every month. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years and each month I get frustrated that there is no option to spit out individual documents (ok, it looks like there is, but it doesn’t flipping work). And nor is there an option to produce PDFs or customize the output file name based on a field in the merge data.

The cool kids would probably be asking ChatGPT to send their invoice e-mails, but that feels like a monthly subscription to a sledgehammer to squash flies with.

This month, I finally Googled it and found some good people had published their VBA macro to sort this out, allowing production of individual PDFs with sensible file names. You don’t have to save the individual Word documents, so comment that bit out if you want just a directory of PDFs at the end.

Now all I need to figure out is how to pass the target e-mail address into the PDF in a “hidden” manner … that might just end up being white text. This can then be picked up by another script to send the actual e-mails.

Onwards and upwards…