Newsletter November 2009
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Women Go Wild Outdoors
have been a client of Working Data since 2008.
This unique outdoor events company "offers women a way to have outdoor
adventures on their own terms and to become part of a community
of likeminded women. Our challenge was " ...
read more
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Emailing List Salutations
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In this third and final part of our three-part series helping you
to tidy and prepare an e-mailing list we look at generating the
salutation.
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In Fig 1, we see the sample data which has a variety of records,
some more complete than others.
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Fig 1
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list of salutations from this?
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First, we decide on the methodology.
If there is a full first name, do we use that instead of the more
formal "Mr or Mrs" followed by the surname? In this case, we do.
So the first thing to do is to test if there is a first name in the first name
column. We also need to check that it is not just an initial, rather
than a full name. To do this we will combine the
IF function with the
LEN function.
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In cell D4 we enter the formula
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=IF(LEN(B4)>1,B4,"surname")
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In plain English this reads as, "If the text in cell B4 (the first name)
has more than one character (therefore is not blank nor an initial)
, then use it, otherwise, just put in 'surname' (we will deal with these
shortly)." We then copy this formula
down column D, as in Fig 2.
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Fig 2
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For those that did not have a first name to use, we now have to determine
if there is enough information to put together the more formal
salutation using the person's title, e.g. Mr Smith.
We ask the spreadsheet if there is a title in the cell in column A
again using the
IF and
LEN
functions.
We amend the formula in cell D4 to read;
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=IF(LEN(B4)>1,B4,IF(LEN(A4)>1,TRIM(CONCATENATE(A4," ",C4)),"Sir / Madam"))
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In plain English this reads as, "If the text in cell B4 is longer than one
character then use that, otherwise, if the text in cell A4 is longer than
one then add that to cell C4, with a space in between (and using the TRIM
function to tidy it up in case there are extra spaces in the data entry),
and if all else fails, use 'Sir / Madam'". See Fig 3.
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Fig 3
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Combining this spreadsheet tip with the two previous tips in this
series,
Removing Trailing Full Stops from Email Addresses
and
Replacing Commas in Email Addresses
, should help you
reduce the amount of time it will take you to get your E-mailing
list ready for use. If you are thinking of carrying out
some Marketing activities, you would be able to generate a targetted
e-mailing list at the press of a button with some
Custom Business Software
from Working Data.
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To download this month's spreadsheet tip, click
here (Remember to virus-scan all downloads from the internet).
Next month we will be offering our newsletter subscribers a VAT
calculation tool to help them with the VAT rate change due on January 1st,
2010. If you have any specific problems you would like it to help you
with, please contact us.
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