Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Personalized E-mails with Google Spreadsheets

I got an e-mail from my son's new basketball coach a couple weeks ago. The message was personalized with my son's name sprinkled throughout the message. "Aha", I thought, "this coach is using Google Power to impress the parents with an e-mail message just for their child."

Today on Twitter, I found an outstanding tutorial from the Google Developer's site on how to create a mail merge e-mail using the data from Google Spreadsheets. If you have an extra 15 minutes, click through this tutorial and you will be able to amaze parents and friends by creating personalized e-mails from your Google Spreadsheets too.

Ann Feldmann

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Teachers, Get Parent Contact Info in a Flash

We just moved to a Google domain this school year! We have been lighting the Google Docs fire in every school we enter.

A real gem this week was showing teachers how to create a Google Form to collect parent information at open house. Many teachers jumped right on this and had a form up and running on back to school nights across the district.  Using the teacher created Google Form, parents entered their data themselves and BANG, there it was in a spreadsheet, just like that. No more PAPER!  While this is a huge time saver, it gets better!

The e-mails collected in the Google Form can easily be exported.  Taking this just a few clicks further,  all the parent e-mails can be added to GMail contacts in a flash.  No tedious typing required.

In Google Drive
1. Open the spreadsheet.
2. File ---> Download As---> CSV

In GMail

1. Select Contacts
2. Import Contacts
3. Browse to the CSV file
4. Click import

Check out the video from our #tt4t channel for a quick tutorial.



As promised, in a flash, all the e-mails addresses are ready to go in G-Mail!  An added bonus is all the information collected in the form appears a note in contacts!  No more digging around for cell phones numbers or addresses!

Check out our our Google Form usage is growing!


-Ann Feldmann