PubliposterPDF mail merge: filling one form many times
You have a form and a list of people. Mail merge is how you avoid filling in the form once per person.
What it means
You have a document to fill in. Not once, sixty times, with the same form and a handful of details changing on each copy. A name, an address, an amount, a date.
Word has done this for decades. The difference here is that the starting document is not a Word file. It is a PDF, laid out by somebody else, and you have no business touching the layout.
Why the usual routes are painful
Three of them come up, and none is pleasant.
Rebuilding the form in a word processor takes a long time, and what comes out no longer looks like the original. When the form has to be recognised by whoever receives it, that matters.
Converting the PDF to Word shifts the frames and breaks the tables. On anything densely laid out, the result is unusable.
Which leaves filling it in by hand, which is what most people do. It is also how row 46’s address ends up on row 47’s copy, and how you find out three weeks later.
How it works here
The PDF is left alone. Text is written on top of it, in the places you point to. What comes out is the original with your data in it, and nothing has shifted because nothing was rebuilt.
- Open the PDF. If it has real form fields they are picked up automatically. If not, you draw the areas yourself, which is covered in filling a PDF with no fields.
- Import the spreadsheet. One row per copy, one column per piece of information. There are a few traps on the file side, especially with CSV, set out in filling a PDF from Excel.
- Say which column goes in which field. Where the names are close, the match is suggested and you correct whatever is wrong.
- Generate. One PDF per row, all of them in a ZIP archive.
Setting up the template is the part that takes time, and you do it once. Templates are saved, and reopen next year.
When it is worth it
Ten copies is enough to pay back the setup. Past fifty there is no comparison. These are the cases that come up most.
| Situation | What changes between copies |
|---|---|
| Charity donation receipts | Donor, address, amount, date |
| Training certificates | Attendee, course, dates, hours |
| Invitations and notices | Recipient, date, venue, reference number |
| Purchase orders, delivery notes | Customer, reference, quantities, total |
| Repetitive official paperwork | Identity, reference numbers, amounts |
About your data
A mail merge is almost always personal data. Names, addresses, often amounts. Sending that spreadsheet to an online service so it can build the documents means handing somebody a copy of it.
Publiposter runs in your browser. The PDF and the spreadsheet go nowhere, for the simple reason that there is no address to send them to. Load the page, disconnect, and the merge still runs. The privacy page explains how to check that for yourself.
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