Colleagues,

On Thursday, we sent out an email about how to use Gmail’s Multi-Send feature. It quickly came to our attention that this feature was replaced very recently with the more advanced “mail merge” feature.  Mail merge has all of the same benefits of multi-send and is a much better option than mass BCC emails.  

Mail merge allows you to link a Google Sheet with up to 1,500 recipients and use any data column from the Sheet as a mail merge tag. Contact information must be in the first tab of your spreadsheet and can only contain text. Here’s how to use mail merge:

1. On your computer, open Gmail.
2. At the top left, click Compose.
   • You can also open an existing draft.
3. Go to the “To:” line.
4. Click Use mail merge:
5. Turn on Mail merge.
6. Click Add from a spreadsheet.
7. Select a Google Sheet, then click Insert.
8. Use the dropdown menus to select the columns from the spreadsheet to determine each recipient’s address (e.g. Lisa Rodriguez <lisa@example.com>). You can choose the following contact information from your spreadsheet:
   • Email
   • First name
   • Last name (optional)
9. Click Finish.
   • Your spreadsheet is added to the “To:” line in the message.
10. In your message, enter “@.”
11. Select a merge tag.
    • Merge tags are determined by the column headers in your spreadsheet.
12. To select a merge tag, press Enter.

Thank you to everyone who sent us their feedback on this recent tip. Of course, as always the SJSU IT Service Desk is here to help by phone at (408) 924-1530 or online.

Thank you,
Bob Lim
Vice President for Information Technology
and CIO at San José State University