Excel Lists for Email

This topic came up again in one of my Excel classes this week and, considering how incredibly useful it can be to so many of us, I thought I would share it with you in this post.

Whether they are employees, clients, or vendors, Lists of Names of people are often kept in Excel. There are times, of course, when you may want to send an email via Outlook to a group of folks that you have in one of these Excel databases.

Outlook and some other email systems requires that the names be entered in a Last Name/Comma/First Name format. So what do you do if that is not the way your Excel list is arranged?

Let’s say you have a list of employees with the First Names in column A and Last Names in column B. Combining them into an Email-Friendly column of names in a “Last Name, First Name” format is so easy you’ll laugh. Here is what you do…

Let’s assume your table starts in cell A1. Using the magic of Concatenation, (there’s a word for yah!), put the following formula in C1:

=B1&", "&A1

Note: Be sure to use the quotation marks and insert a space after the comma.

This formula combines the contents of B1 (last name) with a comma, space, and contents of A1 (first name). Drag the formula down to fill Column C, and then copy and paste it into Outlook.

Bamm! Your Outlook Mailing List is Ready to Go!