Adding a Large Amount of People to a Google Group

A guide explaining how to use Google Groups to make dealing with large numbers of emails much easier, especially for inviting many people to calendar events.

About

You may have a large amount of people that you want to add to a Google Group or to a Calendar Invite. This KBA will explain the process.

Google Groups are a great tool for making it easy to communicate with large numbers of people. It allows you to communicate and collaborate by sending an email to everyone in a group with one address, invite a group to an event, or share documents with a group.

For more information on Google Groups and how to create a Google Group, please see this KBA: Creating a Google Groups

Environment

Google Groups

Microsoft Excel

Google Sheets

Steps

If you have a spreadsheet with a long list of emails, you can add them to a Google Group easily by following these steps.

1. Open your spreadsheet in whatever program you created it with, either Excel or Sheets. Before this list can be copied and pasted into Google Groups, first the list of emails must have a comma at the end of each email. Doing this manually will be very time consuming and tedious, especially if you have over 100 emails.
2. A formula that adds a comma to the end of each email will be used to automate this process. Find an empty column where the corrected emails will be placed with the commas added. Select the empty cell and type this formula in: =A2&","  Note that that this formula will differ depending where in the spreadsheet the emails are located. In the formula, the "A2" represents the location of the email, where A represents the first column, and the 2 represents the second row. Make sure to adjust this location for your emails. 

 

 

3. Once you successfully apply the formula to the first email in the list, you will notice that the email will appear with a comma at the end. Now you will want to do this for the rest of the emails. To do so, select the corrected email with the comma and move your cursor to the bottom right corner of the cell where a cross will appear and double click the left mouse button. This will automatically populate the entire column with the fixed emails. 
4. Now you can copy the entire column of fixed emails to be added to the Google Groups. Because the commas were added, Google Groups will accept all of the emails since they will be separated by commas once pasted.

Different Ways Google Groups Can Be Used

Calendar Events

With all the emails added to your Google Group, you can now add the single email associated with the Google Group to a Calendar event. This will invite all the emails associated with the Google Group to the event. 

Sending Emails or Attachments to Many People

One of the biggest perks of creating a Google Groups is that you can avoid having to type hundreds of email address in the recipient field.

To do this, you can simply send the email to one Google Group email address where it will automatically send it to every person included in the Group.

In the body of the email, you can also send attachments such as documents or photos. This makes collaborating easier when having to send an attachment to many people.

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For more help, please contact ITS at its@manhattan.edu or 718-862-7973.