Can Excel spreadsheet send email alerts?

Microsoft's Office suite is packed with useful features. One of these nifty tools comes from the world of spreadsheets – the ability for your Excel workbook to automatically notify people when something happens. In this article we will cover two different ways that you can use the feature: sending emails or displaying an alert window. Both methods are relatively easy to implement, so there’s no reason not try them out!

How do I set up reminders and notifications in Excel?

The easiest way to get started setting up automated notification messages within Microsoft Excel is by using VBA (Visual Basic For Applications). This method doesn't require any additional software installation beyond Excel itself. The downside is that it requires some programming skills as well as familiarity with Visual Basic syntax. To learn more about writing VB code click here. If you're interested in learning more about creating macros in Excel, check out our previous post: Creating Your Own Macros With VBA [Technology Explained].

Once you've got all that set-up, open up Excel 2016, 2017, 2010, 2019 etc., go to File " Options & Customize Ribbon. From here select Main Tabs then scroll down until you see Developer. Click on it and choose Manage Events. You should now be able to customize which events trigger certain actions.

For example, if you want Excel to run through a series of calculations every month, you would enable the Run Macro Every Month option under Event Actions. Once enabled, make sure to name your new macro and assign it to whatever action you wish Excel to perform upon completion.

You may also want to consider enabling AutoRecover at the bottom, just in case things don't always turn out exactly right. Also, depending on what event types you have selected above, you might find yourself with multiple options available. Be aware that each one has its own unique identifier and function (e.g. =CALCULATE()), though they generally follow similar naming conventions. Check out the image below for reference.

If you'd like to know more about how to build these kinds of custom functions, you can download my free guide on building your first basic function in Excel. It covers everything from getting started with Visual Basic to inputting arguments into formulas and much more.

In short, once you've created those functions within Excel, you can simply copy-and-paste them over to other cells where needed. Then, whenever that cell experiences changes such as being filled out or changed manually, Excel will take care of the rest. That means you won't have to worry about having to keep track of all sorts of triggers manually.

How do I create a pop up alert in Excel?

Another popular alternative to the automation process described above involves triggering an “alert message” instead of running a specific calculation. By doing this, you get a popup box rather than a simple change indicator inside a particular cell range. There are many reasons why someone could prefer this approach, including personal preference, accessibility issues, or perhaps because it makes their jobs easier without requiring extra time spent coding.

To pull off this kind of functionality, you’ll need to utilize another tool called XLOOKUP(). What this does is look up values across multiple columns and return results accordingly. Here’s a quick video tutorial showing how to use XLOOKUP(): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWl0rpk3KM8&t=2m38s

Now that you understand how XLOOKUP works let’s discuss how it fits together with Excel Alerts. First, note that the formula you’re going to use looks like this: =XLOOKUP(A1,$L$5:$U$,4). Now that you know what it does, you can probably guess where to insert it. Simply highlight the desired range and drag it over onto the sheet tab where you want to display the popup. When done correctly, you should see something like this:

This setup allows you to call upon XLOOKUP() anywhere else in future sheets while still keeping the same formatting and layout. Of course, feel free to adjust anything you deem necessary. However, unlike the previously mentioned method involving running calculations, this technique only displays an alert without actually modifying any information.

Note: The screenshot shown above was taken directly from Excel 2010. Although the interface appears slightly different in newer versions, the general concept remains the same.

Finally, if you're looking for even greater flexibility, you can combine both approaches. Let’s say you wanted to modify the current script to include a countdown timer before generating an alert. All you'd have to do is add a few lines of text underneath the corresponding popup. Something along the lines of: =TEXT("",10)", ""=""". You can read further details about combining elements together in Excel via the link provided below.

Can you set Excel to send reminders?

As far as I'm concerned, yes. Though you cannot schedule automatic tasks in Excel, you can certainly set up reminders. Just think of them as tiny little alarms that happen periodically throughout the day.

Here's how: Go back to the Tools menu located in the top left corner of your screen. Select Formulas. Next, type in your reminder equation into the space designated Reminder Text. Finally, select your target cell range and press Enter.

When completed, Excel should begin reminding you 15 minutes after your chosen date and time. As long as your system hasn't been turned off beforehand, you should receive an email alerting you that you missed said appointment.

Can Excel send reminders to Outlook?

Yes again. But unlike the previous section, this feature depends entirely on Outlook. Since you likely already have access to Outlook installed, connecting it to Excel is as easy as opening up Control Panel " Mail, Calendar and People " Add Account...

From here, enter in your account info and hit Create User Information. Afterward, open up the Send Email button in the lower right hand corner of your screen. Choose New Message template… and pick whichever template best suits your needs. Make sure to fill out the Subject field with the title of your scheduled appointment.

Next, browse around to the Scheduled Delivery area and locate the calendar icon. Drag it over to wherever you've placed the appointment on your calendar. Hit OK and voila – your Outlook inbox should start ringing off the hook shortly thereafter.

Hopefully, one of these tips helped you solve your problem. Otherwise, maybe you learned something new today – good luck with your next task!

Have questions about either of these techniques? Feel free to leave us a comment below!

If your company or organization uses Microsoft Office 365 and has an Exchange Server, chances are that at some point in time the system administrators have asked if there is any way for them to be notified when certain events happen within their organizations. Well, they've finally found one!

It's called Reminders, which was introduced with Windows 10 April 2018 Update (version 1803). You may have already heard about this feature being used by other companies as well. The good news is that you don't need to install anything else like Outlook to get started using it. All you need is Excel 2016 or newer versions of Excel. And best of all, it works across platforms including Macs and Linux machines.

Here we will walk you through how you can use the new feature to create automated emails in Excel.

So what exactly is the process behind creating an Excel reminder template? Let us start off by explaining each step so you know where to find everything once you're done.

Can Excel send out email reminders?

Yes, you read correctly. Yes, you too could receive emails whenever someone creates a new entry into a cell in your favorite spreadsheets. That's right—you no longer have to rely on anyone else sending you those pesky text messages asking "Did you finish yet?" Now, just type in your preferred language and hit enter. Your phone will automatically send an SMS alerting you that a person just created something in your document. It doesn't stop there though because now you also won't miss important meetings anymore either since you can simply check the calendar app on your computer screen instead. If you really want to go crazy, why not try setting up a Slack notification via a web browser extension?

You might think that manually entering information in cells would take forever given that most people aren't great with numbers. But fret not because that isn't even close to reality thanks to a very cool tool called VBScript. Using this script, users can input various pieces of information such as employee names, dates/times, etc., without having to worry about typing error-prone sentences. This makes things much more efficient especially when dealing with large amounts of data.

How do I import reminders from Excel to Outlook?

Now that you know whether or not you can actually build automatic emails using Excel, let's talk about importing these templates directly into Outlook. As mentioned earlier, you don't need to download any additional programs or extensions. Just open up Outlook and head over to File & Open & Import & Mail Merge Forms. Once here, click New Form and then select Send Email To Multiple Recipients. A pop-up window should appear after selecting this option. Click OK. Then choose Personal Name, First Middle Initial, Last Middle Initial, Address Line 1, City, State, ZIP Code, Phone Number, Fax, Company name, Dob, Gender, Birth Month, Birthday Year, Anniversary year, Spouse's name, Social Security number, Cell Reference, and Message fields. After doing this, you should see a list of options similar to the ones below under Field List. Select the first item under the second row labeled From address, followed by Next field, Finish.

Next, repeat the above steps again except this time pick Get User Information - Personal Data section as opposed to Mail Merge Forms. Then go ahead and fill in the remaining details as shown above. Lastly, press OK. In addition to creating individual forms, you can also merge multiple documents together into one file. For example, say you wanted to add a bunch of employees' contact info from different sheets onto one form. Simply follow the same procedure outlined above while choosing Combine Documents instead of Mail Merge Forms. When finished, save the resulting file. Afterwards, navigate to File & Save & Create Combined Document... Within this menu, make sure to change the format to Word 97 Text (.txt) rather than Rich Text (.rtf), otherwise you'll end up losing formatting.

Once saved, double-click on the combined document so that the program recognizes its contents. Go back to the previous step and choose to export the merged document. Choose Export Wizard and specify the following settings: Output Format: Comma Separated Values (.csv); Header Options: No header; Delimiter: ; Pipe symbol; Prefix: None.; Continue On Error = True; Ignore Missing Fields=True; and Include Records With Blanks=False. Finally, click Create. Upon completion, you should see the newly-created file with the correct content inside. Navigate to My Computer and save it somewhere convenient. Then, load it into Excel as described previously.

Afterwards, go back to File & Open & Import & Mail Merge Forms. Then select Add Additional Source Files. Head over to Browse until you locate the.csv file you just downloaded. Hit Open, then proceed to select Other Sources followed by Upload Supporting Files. Make sure to uncheck Use separator line. Now, click Finish. Again, choose personalization from the dropdown menu under Customize Settings. Pick Form Layout 1, then scroll down to View Messages Section. Here, look for the Subtitle box and paste whatever you'd like in place of it. Then, move along to the next step. Repeat the last two tasks for every subsequent message you intend to include.

Lastly, copy the entire thing to a separate sheet and give it a meaningful title. Once completed, go back to File & Publish & Print & Print Setup.... Here, switch the printer selection to Internet Printing Protocol and hit Printer. Type in the default URL for your chosen printer and click Print Preview. Find the link that looks closest to what you expect and click Print.

Can you set up Excel to send notifications?

While you still technically cannot build a complete mailer using only Excel, you can definitely set up triggers for specific actions. These allow you to run macros depending on whether a user enters a particular value in a cell. So for instance, maybe you work in IT and you have tons of servers running around your office. Maybe you want to monitor the status of each server, update log files accordingly, and perform other maintenance procedures. Or perhaps you manage inventory levels for products in stock. Whatever the case may be, you can turn these types of scenarios into real-time updates by building custom Excel scripts using Visual Basic. Doing so requires a bit of coding knowledge, however, and you must ensure that your code adheres to the rules imposed by the Office suite. Fortunately, learning VBA isn't difficult and you can learn how to do it yourself online. Alternatively, you can hire a programmer to help you accomplish goals like this. Don't forget to keep track of ongoing projects and milestones via Jira.

Alternatively, you can always resort to creating a manual workflow. Whenever you come across a situation wherein you want to execute a certain action upon seeing a certain condition occur, you can do so easily with the assistance of IF statements. For example, if you want to implement a rule whereby your employees submit expense reports twice per month, you can create an IF statement that checks the date against the current day of the month. If true, it will display a piece of text saying "Report due today!" If false, however, it will ask the user to resubmit the report later. Another method involves looking at the values stored in Column B on Sheet1 and comparing them to the values currently present in Column D on Sheet2. If Column B contains the word "New" and Column D contains the word "Active," then you can assume that the account hasn't been closed.

In both cases, remember to replace the texts with actual commands. Additionally, bear in mind that you can tweak these formulas further according to your needs.

Another nifty trick you can employ is to utilize conditional formatting. By assigning styles to a range of cells, you can prompt a user to do something when said style appears. For example, let's imagine you have lots of lists containing customer orders. Since you never have enough room to store each order individually, you can assign a unique color to each one dependent on the amount of items purchased. This allows you to better distinguish between orders of varying sizes.

As long as you stay away from making mistakes involving Vlookups, lookup functions, and nested formula calls, Excel should handle these operations pretty efficiently. However, if you encounter errors, you can resolve them by consulting official documentation provided by Microsoft as well as searching forums online. One final tip worth mentioning is to avoid exceeding 255 characters per line. Anything beyond that limit may cause issues regarding performance and security.

Additionally, you can integrate Excel services with Azure Logic Apps. Essentially, these tools serve as gateways allowing communication between two disparate systems. They consist of prebuilt logic blocks that provide functionality such as collecting data, transforming it, and acting on said data. Furthermore, integration points can be tailored specifically to meet business requirements.

You could use Outlook or Gmail for your daily emails. But if you're using Microsoft Office 365 subscription and have access to the Power Automate service, then why not try creating automated workflows with Excel spreadsheets? It's much faster than writing macros manually, and more importantly, you don't even need any coding skills!

In this article, we will walk through all steps required to make Excel send us emails automatically whenever there is new information available in our target worksheets. You can also modify this example to suit your needs by changing the sheet names and cell ranges that are used. Let’s get started.

How do I trigger an email in Excel?

The first step is to go into Power Automate “ Create New Workflow.” Select Send Email as Action (the default action) from the Actions dropdown menu. Then just type the name of the person who you want to receive your email notification. In my case, I am going to keep the Target Name field empty so that every time someone enters some data in those cells, they will be sent an email.

Once you've entered both fields, click Save & Run Now. This creates a workflow file named MyWorkFlow.xwb which contains your code. The next thing you might want to do is save this file somewhere safe like Google Drive or Dropbox because once you run it, it will overwrite whatever was already present in your current XLSX files. If you lose it, you may find yourself unable to open these files again without getting errors.

Now that the final piece has been created, let’s add some functionality inside the document itself. Go back into Power Automate Designer " Edit Code. Paste the following script under the Main Function block. Make sure you change the Sheet1 reference to match whichever one you chose.

Sub AutoEmail()

Dim sht As Worksheet

Set sht = Sheets("Sheet2")

With Application

On Error Resume Next

DoEvents

End With

sht.Range("A3").Value = Date

sht.Range("B3").Value = Time

If Not IsEmpty(DLookup("[TargetName]", Range("a3"), 1)) And [TargetType]="Person" Then

SendMail "[Recipient],"Subject Line","This is a test."

End If

End Sub

How do I create an email function in Excel?

It's important to note that when you select Send Email at Step 2 above, you should only choose Do Nothing as the option. Otherwise, your message won't actually reach anyone. Also, since this is an automation process, you must ensure that no other processes are running simultaneously during execution. So before you hit Run now, close out everything else.

When you execute this workflow, nothing happens right away -- until you enter the first line of VBA code. That's where things start happening behind-the-scenes. When you paste this code into the editor window, the designer immediately recognizes that this subroutine requires input parameters. Right below the main function declaration box, it shows you what kind of variables it expects. All the text boxes are blank because the values aren't yet known. To fix this issue, simply type in the actual names of each variable and press OK. Once you do that, hit Run Now. A few seconds later, you'll see your email pop up.

What does the SendMail command mean exactly? First off, it takes three arguments — the Recipient, Subjectline, Message. These are placeholders for different parts of the email body. For instance, you can replace them with specific people's names, department heads, etc. However, if you leave the placeholder value alone, it will insert their respective email addresses directly into the template.

Another cool feature here is the ability to customize the recipient’s subject line. Just check the [Title] parameter in the DLookup statement. You can also specify multiple recipients by separating their names with commas. Keep in mind however, that the number of columns within your table range cannot exceed 255 characters.

Finally, the last argument specifies the content of the email. You can insert anything you want between the quotation marks. Here, we inserted a simple date/time stamp plus a short message. Since this is a public email, we had to remove sensitive details such as passwords and credit card numbers.

Just like Word documents, Excel lets you format various aspects of your messages including font style, color, bolding, italics, bullet lists, indentation, etc. There are plenty of options to play around with. Feel free to experiment and come up with creative ways to deliver the message.

If you wanted to include a hyperlink to another part of the spreadsheet, you would instead use the URL method. Instead of sending an email, you'd direct the user to a certain page via a link. Check out the documentation for further guidance.

How do I set up alert alerts in Excel?

As mentioned earlier, the easiest way to accomplish this task is to edit the existing actions in the Design Mode. Open up the original.xwb file. Switch over to design mode by clicking on Tools " Design View. Afterward, locate the Main Function section and double-click on AutoEmail(). Scroll down to End Sub and delete everything except the two lines highlighted below. Change the yellow highlights to green to confirm changes.

Afterwards, highlight the entire procedure and copy it to the clipboard. Back in the normal editing view, switch over to edit mode and paste the copied code snippet underneath the Normal Procedure area. Click on Ok to apply the changes. Then scroll down to End Sub and delete the rest of the old code. Finally, click on Run Now.

At this point, your workflow will still continue executing normally, meaning that the sheet will update accordingly. What you want to watch out for though is whether the autoemail runs successfully. If it doesn't, your log folder probably got overwritten with junk mail. Luckily, there is a handy little trick called On Error statements that allows you to perform error handling logic within a single line of code.

Let's say you forgot to put something in the Subject line. Or maybe you accidentally left the wrong column title in the header row. Either way, you want to know about these issues right away so that you can troubleshoot and correct them quickly. On Error resume next basically ignores all errors while continuing its job. However, after the workflow finishes, it checks the relevant sheets for errors and reports them back to you.

Here is what the modified script looks like after adding an On Error statement. Notice how the code references different sections of the script depending on whether an error occurred. If none did, the sub continues as usual.

For extra safety, you can wrap the whole thing in Try...Catch blocks too. This helps catch unexpected exceptions. Remember, that in order to debug your scripts properly, you need to enable Developer Ribbon Controls. Head over to File " Options " Customize Ribbon… to bring up the corresponding tab. Under Main Tabs, look for Developer and check Enable Developer Tab.

Can you set up alerts in Excel?

Yes, absolutely! Using the same methodology outlined above, you can program Excel to notify users whenever there is new information in a particular range of cells. However, unlike Word, Excel does not support conditional formatting which means you'll need to resort to formulas and functions.

To help illustrate how this works, consider monitoring sales figures across departments. Suppose you have four rows per department - Sales, Department, Manager, and Supervisor. Whenever data gets updated, you want to receive an instant push notification saying either "New Data Available!" or "Data Updated!".

The formula you will use for this purpose goes like this:  =IF([Sales]<[LastSales],0,"Updated")&" | "&[Department]"

Here's what that looks like in English :

If greater than Last Sale, return 0.

Otherwise, return "Updated"|"Departments".

Make sense? Good. Now, suppose there were 10 rows total, you would use a slightly longer formula. Use this sample formula as a guideline for yours:

=IFS($V$8=""Update"",0,""Updated"")

Where $V$8 refers to cell C8 and 8 represents the eighth row counting from the bottom.

And yes, you can use wildcards (*) to refer to entire rows. For instance, if you wanted to monitor all of the manager rows, you would use *8 rather than specifying a fixed position like =IFS($V$*="update",0,""updated"").

Feel free to adjust the size of your tables as needed. For large datasets, you may want to break them down into smaller chunks. The goal remains the same, however. Monitor the status of certain items or events.