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Visit our blog to discover more ways to use datasets in your daily routine:
Datasets may be of great help to you if you have tables with data that you would like to use in your templates.
To make use of a dataset, you need to create it in Shared Email Templates (TXT and CSV files import is supported) or to connect an Excel table that you have on OneDrive or in SharePoint.
Click the button below to open or download a quick How to use datasets cheat sheet:
See the full video transcript on the Webinar 4: Using datasets in Shared Email Templates page.
In Shared Email Templates, a dataset is a set of values organized into a table from which you can retrieve data for your email messages. An essential category of a dataset is a key column.
The key column is always the leftmost column of your dataset. It can also be called an 'identifier' column because there you'll keep values that help you identify the rows from which data will be taken.
It's very important that all values in your key column are unique, otherwise the app will always take the first row with the value you indicate, even if there are several duplicates of this value in other rows of the key column.
In this section, you'll learn how to create a dataset from scratch (or import a TXT or CSV file) and how to connect an Excel table from OneDrive or SharePoint.
To start creating a dataset, right-click a folder and select New Dataset:
In your default browser, a new tab with the Shared Email Templates web app will open:
Give your dataset a name and select one of the three options:
You can import datasets to Shared Email Templates in TXT or CSV format. If your table is in another format, you can easily convert it to one of the required ones.
You can link an Excel table to a dataset. An Excel workbook can be located on OneDrive or in SharePoint. Before linking an Excel table, take the following points into consideration:
To connect an Excel table, take the following steps:
On the Shared Email Templates pane in your Outlook, select a dataset that you want to edit and click the Edit in browser icon:
To edit the name of your dataset or change any value the dataset contains, simply click it and start typing. To add columns or rows, use the plus sign:
As soon as the necessary changes are made, don't forget to click Save.
If you use a template with a table bound to a dataset, you can get some rows of the dataset selected automatically when you insert the template into an email message. You just need to set those rows as default ones:
When inserting a template with a table bound to the dataset into an email message, you'll see that the default key values are checked in the dialog window:
In case you use the ~%WhatToEnter macro to paste a specific value from the dataset, the key value from the first default row will be preset in the macro dialog window:
There are two ways to add a value from a dataset to a template: either put a placeholder and select a value while pasting a template into an email message or insert a fixed value from a dataset into a template. In the first case, make use of the ~%WhatToEnter macro. In the second case, rely on the ~%DatasetValue macro.
Click the Insert button.
In the template, the macro placeholder will look like in the screenshot below:
The size has to be specified as well:
Finally, the template will look like this:
The ~%DatasetValue macro retrieves any value you need from the dataset that you specify.
If you bind a table in your template to a dataset, the add-in will use specified key values to pull rows and fill in the table when you paste the template into an email message.
To add a table to a template, open the template in the Edit mode and click the Table icon on the toolbar:
You can learn more about tables in our How to create and format tables blog post.
When you paste such a template into an email message, you'll see the dialog window with the specified title and the list of key values from the selected dataset:
Select the necessary checkboxes and click OK.
If your dataset has default rows, their key values are already selected in the dialog window:
A table filled in with the values from the selected rows of the dataset will appear in your email message:
To unbind a table from a dataset, right-click the bound row when editing your template and choose the Unbind from dataset option from the menu:
Follow the steps below if you want any of your templates to contain a list bound to a dataset. This is an example of such a dataset:
When pasting this template into an email message, you'll see a dialog window showing the values that the key column contains:
Pick any you want and click OK:
The list inserted into the message body along with the template will contain the items you have selected:
To unbind a list from the dataset it's bound to, open your template in the Edit mode, right-click the list item, and select the Unbind from dataset option:
Visit our blog to discover more ways to use datasets in your daily routine:
Responses
Is it possible to connect to a table in Google sheets, as opposed to one in Excel? If not, would you please consider adding this functionality?
We use a google form to collect onboarding information from new clients which feeds into a master client list in Google sheets. If we could connect directly to this file it would improve the functionality ten-fold. (as it currently stands we will have to manually transcribe the new customer info from the google sheet over to the "simple" format data set in Shared Email Templates every time we get a new sign up, which is way too tedious and time consuming)
Hello A W,
Thank you for sharing your idea with us. We will consider adding Google sheets support in the future.
Is it possible to access a value from a dataset without asking the user for the key column value? This would be helpful in constructing templates from a common data source. For example:
~%WhatToEnter[{dataset:"Bags",column:"Bag name",value:"Frida-01"}]
Hi Mark,
Sorry, your idea is not quite clear. Is my understanding correct that you want, say, to have two templates with different data from the same dataset?
Hi Eugene,
I'm specifically referring to including data from a dataset in a template *without asking the user to choose the specific record/key column value*.
In my example above, assume that I am creating a template to specifically showcase the Frida bag. I want to pull in the bag name and colour from the dataset, but I don't need to ask the user which bag as I know, for this template.
I had added a new parameter to the WTE example above, *value*, the intent of which would be to grab the data for that Bag without asking the user to specify which bag. It would be as if the user had answered "Frida-01" to the question that would usually pop up when using a WTE with a dataset.
Mark,
Got it. Thank you for details.
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