I recently put Apple’s iWork package to work. Using the mail merge feature between Pages (the word processing part of iWork) and Numbers (the spread sheet part of iWork) was not only easy - the power that came through using the mail merge feature was addicting!
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I recently moved to a village named Chittenango, in Upstate New York. This village's claim to fame is that L. Frank Baum, the writer of
The Wizard of Oz, was born here. Every year in his honor the village holds an event called Oz-stravaganza! Oz-stravaganza is a festival for the whole family to honor Baum and revel in all 13 of the original Baum books, and others, written about the Land of Oz and its neighbors. (Yea, I had no idea the Oz world was so rich with tales either.)
My wife and I joined the Oz-Committee to help organize the event. One of the tasks was to organize a silent auction where all manner of collectable items were up for bid. We had a lot of product data to track, we had to communicate it in various ways; and I had an idea.
I put all of the items into a
Numbers spreadsheet. This allowed us to track details about every item and see everything at a glance. It also gave us the ability to sort all of our data by any field we wanted. For example, we had three days of auctions, so each auction item had a date that it would be up for bid. I could use Numbers to sort the items in alphabetical order based upon the name of the item, or the day that it would be up for bid. We also tracked who had donated the item, and we could quickly sort by that field as well.
This was a great first step at organizing what we were doing. We now had a Numbers sheet tracking everything that was up for bid. The next step was to print out forms for the auction itself, and a master sheet showing what could be bid on for each of the three days. To achieve this, I decided to leverage our work in Numbers by creating a mail merge document in Pages.
Working between
Pages and
Numbers proved to be very easy. Clicking on the View pull down menu, I selected the "Show Inspector" item. Within the Inspector window I selected the "Link Inspector" button along the top. This produced three types of links I could inspect: Hyperlinks, Bookmarks, and Merges. I selected "Merge". If all this sounds complicated, believe me it isn't. The funny thing about describing an intuitive process is that it takes more effort to describe it, than it does to perform it.
Once I had the Merge area displayed within my Inspector window, I only had to click on the "Choose..." button and select the
Numbers document I had created to store all of the silent auction items. The rest was as simple as typing in place holder text for the information that will be pulled out of the Numbers sheet, such as "item_name"; and then, clicking the "+" symbol to add a new Merge Field. In the Inspector window I could then use a pull down menu on any of the fields I added to change the “target Name” - which is the name of the field in the Numbers document. Again, seeing the GUI in front of you, you probably wouldn’t even need these little pointers.
This was all so easy to do, that I volunteered to assist in tracking all the "Thank You" letters that needed to be sent out. Next year we will be re-using all of this data to leverage this year’s work. With a little bit of planning, and an intuitive software package like
iWork, I saved hours of time that would have been spent creating lists and forms by hand. We will save even more time next year by continuing to use information that has already been input. I hope this gives you an idea to better use the technology you have invested in; and I hope to see you at next year’s Oz-stravaganza!