The holiday season is back! Stores are stocking their shelves with the season’s must-haves and calendars are quickly filling up with travel and office parties. With all the hustle, bustle and festivities, occasionally remember to send out those holiday cards and thank-you notes gets lost in the tinsel and taffeta. Well, you’re in luck, because this year we’ve put together a project for you to easily send out holiday thank-you notes and cards the nostalgic, old-fashioned way.

Last year, Sam showed us how to Automate Your Holiday Cards with OfficeWriter, and this year we’ve added thank-you notes to the mix. So you can spend less time on holiday prep and more time on the things that matter most – friends and family.

Using a few built-in tools with the .NET Framework, OfficeWriter, and templates, you can personalize every card for each one of your friends and family. See the example below. Then make your own by following these steps:

STEP 1 – DOWNLOAD OFFICEWRITER:

To get started, you will need to have OfficeWriter installed in order to be able to use the sample code below. In my solution, I used OfficeWriter and its built-in WordTemplate functionality to do a server-side mail merge. If you do not have OfficeWriter, you can download a free evaluation here.

STEP 2 – DOWNLOAD SAMPLE CODE:

Next, you will need the sample code. Download the sample solution here. This solution comes bundled with:

• Sample code
• Easily modifiable templates for holiday cards, mailing labels, and thank-you letters.
• Dummy data from a Gmail Contact Export

Open the solution, run the generator, and you can see the three items:

SAMPLE OUTPUT:

• Greeting Cards
• Mailing Labels
• Thank-you Cards

SAMPLE CODE:

OfficeWriter makes it easy to generate the finished holiday cards, labels, and thank-you cards. With about 5 lines of OfficeWriter code for each template, within minutes you can go from nothing to a finished, picture-perfect file. The sample code below is a simple way to parameterize the code to handle all of our template files. Continue reading Create your Holiday Cards with OfficeWriter, The Sequel →