Say for example that you have a spreadsheet that contains your organization’s membership list as shown in the figure below.

You have some information that you want to send to each of the members. This information can be either a simple email message or some form or document you need sent to everyone on your list. You do this often enough that you want to find an easier way to do it, or the membership list changes often enough that any email distribution list you create will be invalid a few moments after you create it.

The first thing you have to do is get your membership information into the FormBlaster program so it can work with it. FormBlaster cannot work directly with spreadsheet files, but both FormBlaster and most spreadsheet programs support a file format called Comma Separated Value (CSV) format. With CSV files, all of the spreadsheet formatting is removed and the file only contains each spreadsheet row with each column value separated by a comma.

The following figure shows what a spreadsheet looks like when saved in CSV format.

Once you have saved your membership spreadsheet in CSV format the data can be easily imported into FormBlaster. Once the data is imported into FormBlaster, you configure FormBlaster by telling it what you want sent to each member and how you want it to handle members who do not have email addresses.

You can import as many CSV files as you want into FormBlaster. If you get membership data from multiple sources, you can setup a single FormBlaster project then import multiple data sets into the program.

For email message content, you can either send a simple message to each member or you can send customized messages. In the dialog shown below, FormBlaster is configured to process the message content and substitute values in the message with fields from the spreadsheet.

In the example, the values in brackets (<<First Name>> and <<Last Name>>) including brackets will be replaced with the corresponding fields in the imported spreadsheet before the message is sent to the recipient.

In this case, a file attachment will also be included and FormBlaster can be configured to either send the file attachment as is, or process the attachment just like it processed the mail message content (as shown above) replacing text in the document with corresponding values form the spreadsheet.

Once you have all of the names imported, you are ready to start blasting emails out to your membership. Refer to the section entitled Performing a Blast for more information.

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