Tutorial: split CSV to columns for Easy Mail Merge
Easy Mail Merge supports multiple mailing list source formats, including CSV files. Practically, you can import an unlimited number of mail merge columns & fields, from CSV files to your mail merge campaigns. Once your CSV content is imported, you can use it to customize (personalize) your mass emails.
However, based on your support requests, some of you have problems properly importing data from CSV files. This article tries to shed some light on formatting & importing CSV files to Easy Mail Merge.
The most common issue is the one where Easy Mail Merge imports all CSV columns as a single data column. This usually happens because your CSV columns are not properly delimited. CSV stands for “Comma Separated Values”, so your CSV columns must be separated with a comma and not other delimiter.
On the other hand, some 3rd party programs generate “CSV” files using other delimiters, such as semicolons or dashes. These are not standard CSV files, so Easy Mail Merge (or even Excel, for that matter) will not recognize the data columns and it will import all data as a single column.
How to split CSV to columns
To fix this issue, you have to split your CSV file to columns with the standard comma separator. There are two basic solutions:
– open your CSV file with any text editor application (WordPad would do just fine) and use the Search & Replace function to replace your columns delimiter with a comma delimiter. For example, replace ; with , then save the CSV file;
– open your CSV file with Microsoft Excel, select the column that you need to split, then go to the Data top menu and select “Text to columns”. On the popup window, choose the Delimited option and click Next. Now you can select the current delimiter that will be used by Excel to determine & split your CSV data to columns. On our example, the current delimiter is a semicolon:
Once you are done splitting your CSV file to columns, you can save it back as a CSV file and import it to Easy Mail Merge. Then you can use the columns as mail merge sources in order to personalize your mass email content.
[…] 1. Easy Mail Merge didn’t import all data columns as mail merge fields This issue usually happens when the mail merge session is using a CSV file for the mail merge fields. Most likely, Easy Mail Merge didn’t import all columns because the CSV columns are not properly delimited using the standard comma separator. See this tutorial on how to properly format a CSV file. […]