Now that the economy is picking up a bit I’ve been doing a some mailings. There are several postcard printing services out there and I picked Vistaprint because several people I know have used them and because they have Photoshop templates that tell you exactly how the postcards should be laid out to satisfy printing requirements and postal service regulations.
They also have a spreadsheet that you can use for uploading addresses. It’s a bit of a pain to get the names and addresses from my database to the spreadsheet so I thought I’d try the comma separated values method instead. Unfortunately, they have no guidance on how to label the columns but after a bit of trial and error I think I’ve figured it out.
First, I tried using the headings in the spreadsheet, but that didn’t work. Then I looked at a file of rejected addresses from a previous mailing. I noticed that the headings are separated by commas but do not have quotes and do not have the asterisks that they use in the spreadsheet to indicate required items.
This is an example of a successful upload.
First Name,Last Name,Address Line 1,City,State,Zip Code "ROBERT","BORDEN","33 SEABRING AVE","PISMO BEACH","CA","93445" "RODNEY R","BROWN","PO BOX 3955","GUADALUPE","CA","93465"
I’m guessing that the order doesn’t matter, but it’s easy to use the same order as the spreadsheet, so that’s what I’ll do. Missing fields are OK—as long as they aren’t the required ones.
Update: People have been buying my Spanish-language apps and I wanted to send a mailing to them. Unfortunately, VistaPrint mangles the non-ASCII characters in their names and addresses, e.g. ñ, é, á. It turns out that if you encode your .csv file as Western (ISO Latin 9) instead of Unicode (UTF 8) it works fine.