The save-the-dates have been mail-merged, assembled, sealed, stamped, and are on their way to a suburban post office in hopes of avoiding the central Chicago processing center where many a non-standard sized envelope meets a violent, shredded doom. The latter decision stems from multiple wedding invitations arriving months late taped back together or not at all. This year’s batch of Christmas cards was no exception. The RSVP cards in the actual invitation will also return to a non-Chicago address in hopes to avoid this problem as well. Since the save-the-dates are refrigerator magnets, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the postal processing won’t freak out.
We used Google Documents’ spread sheet application to easily share a master address file so anyone on the “address committee” could add and edit the list. Of course, “everyone” turned out to be the two of us despite multiple training sessions. Still, it worked very well. Once assembled, the list was broken down to a smaller save-the-date list and then exported as an Excel sheet. This process worked pretty well, but there were a few easily-fixed, minor formatting errors having to do with color, etc. Not a big deal. Once in Excel format, I used Word to create a mail merge with the .XLS as the database. It was a snap. That feature has come a long way since the Word for Windows I used in high school. Being able to edit individual envelopes was also very handy for those eastern European names that need more than one line. The merge was also smart enough to retain the envelope orientation in the printer as well as knowing when to use a second address field for unit numbers, etc. when necessary and when to skip it.
Now if I could only get this envelope glue taste out of my mouth.
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