Tip #26: Filter your records before merging a document

Tom is an HR executive who has to send onboarding emails every month to newly joined employees. He has a master spreadsheet with all the employee details, and new employees are added to them as they join.

It's the month of March and Tom has to send onboarding emails to employees who've joined this month. But, how is Tom going to go through a big spreadsheet with multiple new and past information, and send onboarding emails to the set of newly joined employees?

 

 

Simple, by filtering and merging them in batches. 

 

Writer lets you filter records before merging a document, so you can avoid sending emails to previously contacted recipients. Here's how:

 

1. Prepare the template and choose the data source (To learn more about creating templates, click here)

 

 

2. Click on the Filter option, next to the data source. Now Tom can either filter the data by specifying the range or by using the conditions. 

 

Tom can use filters to specify the range of the data to be included.

By filtering using range

 

1. Choose the Between a particular range option and specify the range as 23-38 (as the 23rd record is the first employee who joined in March and the 38th record is the last).

 

2. Now after merging, the merged result will affect only records from 23 to 38.

 

Additionally, Tom can also filter the data by adding a condition that includes only employees who've joined in March.

 

By filtering using conditions

 

1. Choose the Based on Conditions option. Since Tom is filtering based on the month of joining, he would select the condition as Month of joining <contains> March. 

 

2. Now after merging, the merged result will only pull the details of employees who have joined in March.

Tom is now happy that he got the job done right and didn't end up spamming his older employees. Got questions regarding this feature? Let us know in the comments below.

 

 

 Happy writing!

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