email shortcut

I figured out a shortcut that will save me time in sending group emails -- a way to easily put a bunch of email addresses in the "to" line of my emails without having to enter each one individually. Put simply, a distribution list. Yeah, I am sure Gmail has a way to do it, but I haven't figured it out.

I am the newsletter editor for LIDS. In that capacity, I sometimes have to send group emails to the entire LIDS membership. I have a membership list in a spreadsheet with several dozen email addresses. In the past, I've typed each email address in. I haven't had to type the full addresses because of the predictive features. But it's still a pain in the ass. And it's prone to error.

But I realized -- and I wonder how it took me so long to realize -- that I can use Excel's features to create my distribution list. Using Gmail's website for my email, the required format for entering multiple addresses in the "To" line is to separate addresses with a comma and a space. So in the membership spreadsheet, which has one row for each member (or couple), I added a new column for the distribution list. As the rows go down, it builds the list. So the entry in the last row is the full list -- which I can copy and paste in the "To" field. I figure I can do this for other things where I have more-or-less set lists of people to send emails to. The JEA Board, Keith's film class...

For the purposes of illustration, I created a simplified list of three names, showing how the distribution list would grow. This obviously works for longer lists. If someone changes email addresses, or people are added or removed, this is easy to change. In the LIDS list, I also included logic to ignore rows where there is no email address -- yes, we have a few members who eschew such things. For what it's worth, people who are more comfortable in Word can create and update a similar type of list in Word and use it in GMail. But I used Excel because I am much more comfortable in spreadsheets than in word processors.

I used my LIDS list this past weekend to send out the fall newsletter, and it was so much easier.

All that said, I realized as I wrote this that I probably could have Googled something like "Create a distribution list in GMail." I'll bet there's a simple way of doing it. But I have my solution so, whatevs...