Google Sheets Set Field Name For Mail Merge
Have you ever needed to take data from Google Sheets and import it into Google Docs? And then print that data or create things with it? For my school’s Field Day students use a Google Form to select activities. Once the activity is full, it automatically removes itself from being a choice in the Google Form. About 400 students fill out the form and from there, they each need a custom schedule that shows them their activities for the day.Printing all of this data from Google Sheets is impossible. It’s not formatted properly, it’s difficult to read, and it’s not user-friendly for middle school students.
This is when a mail merge becomes necessary. The data has to be sorted into a usable format for students so that they can easily see what they need to do and where they need to do it. Step 1 Install the autoCrat plugin on your Google Sheets form responseYou can do this by Add-ons - Get Add-ons - and searching for autoCrat. You can also. Step 2 Open autoCratOnce installed go to Add-ons. From there go to autoCrat and click on Open. A pop-up will appear and it will take a few seconds for everything to pop-up.Note: Give this add-on time to work.
It will do everything you want, it just takes a little time. Step 3 Click on New JobStep 4 Give Your Job a NameOnce you have given it a name click on “Next.” Step 5 Create or Choose a TemplateThis is probably the most difficult step of the whole process if you haven’t done a mail merge before. To begin with, autoCrat needs a dummy Google Doc that has tags showing where to place the data at. This is just a template that will be used to generate all of the pages or other outputs that you may want. The nice thing about this is that the final output will retain all of your formatting.
Text, fonts, sizes, colors, and anything else will be fully retained and the data from your Google Sheet will automatically adapt to fit what is there.My suggestion would be to make a test version first and play with the settings. TagsThe tags that you will need to make in your Google Docs are items that your Google Sheet will search out so that it knows where it should put given information. Tags always start with. The text in between is the ID or title that you will use to identify a column of your Google Sheet. In the example below, you can see all of the tags of the data that I will be using. Each tag corresponds with a column in my Google Sheet file.Just make sure that each piece of data that you want on your Google Doc has a tag somewhere in the Doc.
The tags do not need to match what the column names are inside of Google Sheet but it does make things go quicker if you do.What I like to do is make a copy of my Google Sheet once I have the data, or at least a new sheet in the workbook, and change all of the column header names to match my tags. It makes things simpler in my mind, but it may not for you and that’s fine. Step 6 Match the Tags with the ColumnsWhen you click the next button autoCrat will automatically scan your Google Doc for tags.
G Suite Mail Merge
It will then ask you to match the tags with a column from your Google Spreadsheet. If the names of the tags and columns match exactly, it will automatically get them. Otherwise, you will have to select the proper one from the dropdown list. When done, click next.Note: You can have images or hyperlinks automatically brought in as well. You are not limited to just text. To change this go to the “standard” dropdown on the left and choose the option that fits your needs. To be honest I’ve never used anything other than standard, but I have some ideas of how this might be used.
Google Docs Mail Merge Script
You can read about it in Step 12.