The journey is ended for the mail merge story in Business Central
Well maybe a very strange title 😊. But let me clarify this. Since the journey to the web client of Business Central the functionality of the interaction logpost was broken. The mail merge (also known as Segments) was broken because it was using components on the client side. And as everybody knows the web client cannot access anymore of those dll’s.
So that is why Microsoft introduced in Business Central 2021 wave 1 the usage of Word Templates. This was only based on one table and you can export it a few outputs (Doc, Docx, PDF, Html and text).
To setup it is very isseu with the dailog. One think is good to know: if you create a new template you must download a .zip file. In that .zip file there are two files.
The first file (the .docx) is your template to insert your letter. The second file (the .xlsx) holds the datasource. This file is for the merge functionality in MS Word:
Now you can select all the fields from the customer table in this example into your document. When you are finished you must upload the .docx file into Business Central and you are ready to use.
But now in Business Central 2021 wave 2 the related tables is introduced. You can select two options. the simple and the advanced:
The simple method it shows you only the tables that has a relation with your table where you started from. The advanced is a list of all tables and you must figure out the relation by yourself.
So finally with this new feature you can have a more complex lay-out and use more data that is inside Business Central.
The second enhancement of the Word Templates is that you can use it in your e-mail. You can attach a word template to your e-mail or you can use a word template as your body.
So now you can have a nice prefilled mail body or attach a standard document. But that is sending just for sending one mail per customer. And if you have a mailing for 100 customers it is very painful for the user 😊.
So the last modification is to introduce the Word Templates into the interaction logpost.
To create a Word Templates for your interaction logpost you have to create it from the list of interaction logposts:
The source is “Interaction Merge Data”. And after you have set it up ou can fill the column “Word Template Code”
And of course this interaction you can use in your segments. So now you are happy when you have to send an e-mail to 100 customers 😊.
And offcourse it is not reaching to MailChimp / Dynamics Sales and other application. But for simple tasks it is very usefull. So set it up and keep on mailing 😊.
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