How to mail merge from Excel to PDF
Three steps: bring your spreadsheet, set up the document once, download every PDF at the end. Your spreadsheet and the PDFs it becomes are never sent anywhere — see the privacy page for exactly what is and is not kept.
1. Load your data
A CSV or Excel file (.csv, .xlsx, .xls, .xlsm, .ods), read in your browser rather than uploaded. Each row
becomes one document, and the column names become the placeholders you drop into the
template. If the first row is data rather than headings, say so when you load it and the
columns are named column_1, column_2 instead.
Numbers and dates print exactly as they appear in your file — format them in Excel, not here. There is no date syntax to learn, and nowhere for the formatting to disagree with itself.
No spreadsheet to hand? The first screen offers a sample one, and the template menu then offers a template written for it.
2. Choose what kind of template
There are two, and the difference is whether the document is yours to change.
Write it here, or bring a Word file in and edit it
Start from a blank document, or import an existing .docx or PDF as a starting
point. Whatever comes in, you fix it up once in the editor — it becomes boolkpdf's own
document from then on, not a Word file you keep bouncing back to. Anything the importer
could not carry across is listed for you rather than left to be found in the preview.
Insert a placeholder anywhere the text should change from one row to the next, such as a client's name. Fields sit alongside them for the opposite case: a value that is the same across the whole batch and is saved with the template, so a template you reuse for years does not need its wording touched when only a season or a price changes.
Or put values on a PDF that stays exactly as it is
For a document that is already finished and not yours to redraw — a pre-printed form, a certificate a designer made, an official model somebody else issues. Nothing on the page moves and nothing reflows; you only add the values.
If the PDF has fillable fields, boolkpdf lists them and pairs the ones whose names match your columns by itself — it tells you it did, so you can check rather than discover.
Tick boxes and drop-down lists are filled too. A tick box is ticked by any value
in the cell except an empty one, 0, no or false. A
drop-down takes one of the options the form itself offers — spelling and capitals are
forgiven, and a cell saying anything else is left as the form drew it and reported, rather
than guessed at. Radio buttons and option lists are named and left alone.
If the page already says something that should not be there — a sample name in the box, last season's fee — the Cover tool draws a rectangle in the colour of the paper over it, and your value goes on top. It takes the colour from the page itself, so it works on grey and cream as well as white. It covers rather than erases: the text underneath stays in the file, so do not use it to hide anything private.
If it has none, you put a box where each value goes. Boxes snap to the ones already on the page, and each one shows your first row's value as you set it, so the size and the typeface are chosen against the real thing rather than an empty rectangle. Helvetica, Times or Courier, in bold or italic, per value.
Either way, a placeholder or a box with no matching column is pointed out before you generate anything. It does not stop you — a template written before its data is a reasonable thing to have — but it will not fail silently in the middle of a batch either.
3. Preview and generate
The preview renders the real PDF with real values, and you choose which row it uses, so you
can check the long name and the empty cell rather than only the first one. Name the files
from your own columns while you are there — Quote_{{client}}.pdf beats a folder of document_1.pdf.
Then choose the shape and generate. Separate PDFs gives you one file per row in a ZIP; one PDF puts every row into a single document, in the order of the rows — for a batch that goes to a printer, or gets signed in one sitting. Either way you name what comes down. Three hundred documents take a couple of seconds, because your own machine does the work.
What costs money
Everything above is free, up to 25 rows in one batch. Load three hundred and the first 25 still become real PDFs in a real ZIP — the rest wait behind a subscription, which is €9.99 for the first year.
The subscription also buys the other half: keeping your templates. What you are working on is written down in your browser every few seconds whether you pay or not, so closing the tab costs you nothing — but a draft is not a library. Without a subscription there is nothing to come back and open, and a browser clears what a script wrote after a while unvisited. With one, a saved template is in your account, encrypted, on whichever computer you sit at. What the two plans include →
The same job in other tools
Ready to try it? Open the app.