Using TextExpander for email merge

It’s the end of another semester, and a lot of my lab students have been asking me what their lab grade is going to be. I don’t keep an online gradebook for my labs, so I needed a quick way to send them an update with their current grade. I keep their grades in a spreadsheet, and in the past I went so far as to create a mail merge report and send each student a PDF of their results, which was a fairly time-consuming process. Instead I turned to a Swiss Army knife called TextExpander.

TextExpander is a program that runs in the background and waits for you to type a specific sequence of keystrokes. When it detects that sequence, it fires and inserts the text you have associated with that shortcut at the point of your cursor. Not only can it insert the prescribed text, it can also do some thinking and use variables. For example, here is my snippet for the text of an email to a lab student:

Lab Grade Update

You have a %clipboard in lab, which includes your lab exam grade and all assignments handed in to date.

The real magic in this snippet is the %clipboard part, which TextExpander fills in with whatever is present on the system clipboard when the snippet is expanded. Before expanding the snippet in the body of an email, I just select the grade in my spreadsheet and copy it. When I type the couple magic keystrokes, the text above is inserted, complete with that student’s score.

OK, so this isn’t so much a real ‘mail merge’ as a ‘data merge’, but it’s still a time saver and requires effectively zero setup. It also works with whatever is on the clipboard, meaning it is not tied to a specific data store, unlike a traditional mail merge and its data mapping requirements.