Mailing lists and OmniOutliner

Posted by Amontillado
Feb 16, 2026 at 02:54 PM

Mail merge is handy for things like when Congress is begging for a whup-down, which generally happens on those times when a weekday ends in “Y”.

I’ve been using a spreadsheet. Columns are added for greeting address, and whatever else I want to use as mail merge fields. I’ll keep a list that may have use in the future, so sometimes I need to omit some records.

A checkbox column lets me select which lines to keep. A quick copy to a new tab lets me delete the unchecked rows for an export to a mail merge CSV.

Today I discovered I can add mail merge fields as columns in an OmniOutliner file. Filtering the file on checked boxes gets rid of lines I don’t want. The OO topic notes are in the way, so View->Hide All Notes cures that. Any columns I don’t want in the mail merge, such as a date column for tracking when I last mailed a person, can be hidden.

Export to CSV only exports what you can see, so I get a perfect mail merge file of only the records I want.

A silly trick, but it’s helpful. There may be better ways. Eager to hear.

Posted by satis
Feb 16, 2026 at 05:13 PM

If you import contacts directly into OO from a CSV, if you use columns for First Name, Last Name, Email, Notes, etc. you can use column-based filters to manage specific groups or segmentations (e.g., family, current clients).
OO can be used in all sorts of interesting ways, even if it doesn’t match the features of full-featured apps. You can make quasi-GANTT timeline charts by creating colums like StartDate/EndDate/Duration and use the Indent feature to create hierarchical task dependencies & subtasks—then create a filter that sorts tasks by start date to visually group them in chronological order.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 16, 2026 at 09:38 PM

It would be a killer feature if you could print mailing labels from within OmniOutliner, but nobody thinks about physical mail any longer. Six or seven years ago, I was looking at one of the top membership software applications. I was impressed, but I wanted to be able to print mailing labels from it. I wrote to the developer and asked about printing directly to mailing labels. The response I got back was a quizzical, “why would you want to do that?”

Posted by satis
Feb 17, 2026 at 05:53 AM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

> nobody thinks about physical mail any longer

True. In the last century I used a couple of heavy-duty label printing programs but it became much less important over time as the use of the mails dramatically decreased. For a few years for personal use I resorted to a couple of macOS apps to individually print envelopes with my laser printer: Addressix and EasyEnvelope. But with the Mac the systemwide Page Setup makes basic envelope printing simple with included apps like Contacts and Pages.

For a while at home I had a wide-label Dymo or Brother label printer connected to my Mac, purchased with the intention of using it for envelopes as well as kitchen spice jars and frozen foods and the like, but it got such little use I disconnected and donated it.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 17, 2026 at 04:27 PM

I’m not stymied in label printing. Just do a CSV export and then run a mail merge in Word. I haven’t tried it in Pages. Will have to.

I think mail is still a more effective way to reach out to people for certain things (such as renewing memberships) than is email. Inboxes get so full of spam and other email that it is very easy to miss a reminder to renew than it is when a piece of mail arrives in your mailbox.

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