Saturday, August 2, 2014

The Great College T-Shirt Project Day 2

In that blog post I mentioned yesterday, that guy said that he had found a website that listed about 1,700 colleges and each one had a link to click on to send them an email or something like that. In my own searches of the internet I found a similar website but instead of one long list it’s a map of the USA. You can click on each state and that brings up a list of colleges in that state so I’ve started going through those. But instead of clicking the email links, which some of them have and some do not, I was just copying the email addresses into a spreadsheet.

My plan was to create a long list in this spreadsheet and then find some way to get Microsoft Outlook (my email program) and Microsoft Excel (the spreadsheet) to work together and maybe send all those emails automatically. Of course I would also need to loop Microsoft Word in there as well because that’s where I would type up the email template.

So anyway, after a couple of days I now have a little over three hundred colleges in my spreadsheet along with the email addresses. Before going any further I thought I would try to figure out how to do the emailing. I searched the internet again and apparently it is possible to do all that in newer versions of the Microsoft Office programs, but my version is an old one from 2000 and it just won’t be as easy as I had hoped. I did, however, get the mail merge feature in Word working so I can create a personalized email body for each college but I think I’ll still have to email each one individually like that other guy did. He said it took him an entire summer to get through all 1,700 of them and that’s okay, I’ve got time. So now that I have some email addresses to work with I think I’ll start sending out a few emails each day while continuing to gather more addresses.

And that’s where the Great College T-Shirt Project stands right now.

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