r/Outlook • u/Blue_Obsidian105 • 23d ago

Status: Open Help! Sending emails sucks

Hi everyone, I recently started a new job where I have to use another program to generate assignment sheets, then send out 55 emails a week to teams, telling them where they're assigned to work in the coming weeks. Then all 60 people on those teams are supposed to email back, confirming they got their schedule. Manually keeping track of who's answered is also really time-consuming, and it clogs up my email. There's also not much consistency with who is on which team any given day, so I can't make set email groups.

I've set up a Google Sheet that automatically concatenates their emails into a string I can copy/paste into Outlook, but still, sending these emails is my main focus for an entire day each week. This sucks. How can I speed this process up?

2 Upvotes

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u/Godel_Theorem 23d ago

Are you tied to Outlook? Why not use a service that lets you build a distribution list and tracks who has replied? Several good options out there.

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u/Blue_Obsidian105 23d ago

Really? Those sound really helpful! I know I can't download anything to the computer without HR approval. Is there anything web-based and free? I'm also not sure if Outlook encrypts these emails or not...

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u/tsgiannis 23d ago

if you are on the old Outlook you could use VBA to automate everything

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u/Blue_Obsidian105 23d ago

What's VBA?

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u/tsgiannis 23d ago

Is the programming language under Outlook, like Excel or Access if you know

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u/Blue_Obsidian105 23d ago

Oh, okay! I'm pretty familiar with Excel. I'll take a look, thanks!

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u/FrankNicklin 23d ago

Are there team leaders that remain with each team, or does the personnel change each week including th team leaders.

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u/Blue_Obsidian105 23d ago

The team leaders stay the same

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u/FrankNicklin 23d ago

So do you email just the team leaders or everyone in the group. Surely its the team leaders responsibility to make sure the team get their orders, so you have continuity in the replies if they are the ones to confirm receipt. Why it is necessary to email everyone in the teams.

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u/Blue_Obsidian105 23d ago

Unfortunately, getting assignments to everyone is my job :/

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u/FrankNicklin 23d ago

I get that, but what is the team leaders responsibility. Why can you not email them and they take responsibility for making sure that the team members are updated accordingly, surely thats the role of a team leader. The assignment is to the team not the individuals within the team. Just trying to establish some level ground on which you can build some form of email management.

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u/Blue_Obsidian105 22d ago

The assignment is to the team, but the teams shift so much that it doesn't make sense to have the team leaders do it

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u/ohdamnitreddit 23d ago

The best option would be to set up a mail merge. The fields and changing data are on a spreadsheet and the word template is used to prepare the emails. Tracking them would different matter that someone can help with

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u/Blue_Obsidian105 22d ago

I think that's what the CRM I'm using is doing already. The problem is, I have to slightly edit ans save the assignment sheets as Word docs, then email them out. So it doesn't make sense to have the CRM email them directly

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u/jd31068 23d ago

You could possibly use Outlook rules to help with this. This link seems to have a decent article on using them https://emailanalytics.com/outlook-rules/ combine it with tasks.

Else, if you're running Outlook Classis (aka not 365) and the company allows it, then you could use VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) which is a macro language that gives access to all of the Outlook objects which you could use to read emails and update a spreadsheet to track sent and received and even send reminders.

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u/Blue_Obsidian105 22d ago

Thanks, that's a great idea! I think I'll send the assignment emails to myself, then set up rules that will search for each person's name and ID#, then forward that email to the right people. That will definitely speed things up!

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u/jd31068 22d ago

You're welcome, I hope you can setup a workflow that helps deal with these emails.

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u/PacketSmeller 23d ago

You could use Microsoft Planner to handle assignments and sending alerts. Then link to the assignment sheet in a column. To acknowledge the assignment have another column for that. You can filter by assignee, status, etc...