QR code badges from your Excel attendee list
Papely takes the badge you already designed and prints each attendee’s name, their organisation and their own reference on it. The QR field carries whatever that person’s cell holds, and every badge goes out by email as its own link — so before the doors open you know who already has theirs.
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Marta Ferrán
Ediciones Bellver
Reference
AS-2026-0184
The design is signed off. The list is not.
The badge itself is finished — somebody laid it out, somebody approved it, and nobody is redoing it the week of the event. What is not finished is the list. Registrations are still arriving, three people changed organisation, two are speaking now instead of attending, and every one of them needs a card with their own reference on it. So either a designer opens the same file two hundred and forty times, or the reference gets written in by hand at the desk, in front of the person waiting for it.
Four things change from badge to badge. One of them is a code.
Papely does not redraw the credential. You upload the PDF you already have, place the fields once, and every card repeats that placement with one row’s data in it — including a QR field, the only one that turns a value into an image.
AS-2026-0184
AS-2026-0185
AS-2026-0186
AS-2026-0187
- Their name
- The line that gets read across a room. A text field: you place it once, and every card prints its own.
- Their organisation
- Company, university, department — whichever column of your list carries it. A row that leaves it empty prints blank there, and the run carries on.
- What kind of pass it is
- Speaker, attendee, crew, press. Another text field, so the wording is yours rather than a list Papely hands you.
- Their reference, as a QR
- A QR field takes the value in that person’s cell and encodes it as it stands. A registration id, a ticket reference, a URL — whatever your own system already uses to identify them.
It encodes the code. It does not read it.
Papely does not invent references, does not check them and does not scan anything at the door. What a code means when somebody points a phone at it is decided by your check-in app, your access control or your ticketing platform. Papely’s part ends when the badge is generated and delivered.
One PDF per attendee, at your template’s size
Every row produces its own document, the size of the PDF you uploaded. Papely does not lay several badges out on a sheet, add cutting marks or set up a print run: if the cards are going to a printer, that imposition happens there or in your own PDF tool, from the files Papely produces.
The run, step by step
Four moves. The first three are yours, and only once — after that an edition is one run.
Upload the badge
The PDF that came back approved, at whatever size the credential is. It goes up once and is reused for every edition you run from it. Nothing inside it is redrawn.
Place the fields
Drag the name, the organisation, the pass type and the QR box onto the card where they belong. You do it for one attendee and it holds for all of them.
Bring the attendee list
One row per person, with their email address, their reference and whatever else prints. Import an .xlsx or a CSV, work from the Google Sheets add-on, or push the rows out of your registration system through the API.
Send, then read what comes back
Papely produces one PDF per attendee, emails each to its own address, and keeps a line per person with what happened to it. Nothing is left to attach and nothing goes out by hand.
Before the doors open, you know who is missing theirs
Each attendee gets an email with a link to their own card, not an attachment, and that is what makes the rest of this possible: an attachment leaves and is never heard from again, so who never got it surfaces at the desk on the morning, with a queue behind them. A link can be counted. Papely keeps one line per attendee with four states, none of them guessed — sent, delivered, bounced, downloaded. The week before the event that is a working list rather than a report: the people who have not downloaded theirs are who to remind, and a bounce is one address to fix while there is still time to fix it.
And it stays reachable: somebody who deleted the email, or who is at the entrance with a flat battery, opens the same link again without writing to anybody for a resend.
There is no fifth state for opens. Papely does not record whether an email was opened, and that is a deliberate omission rather than a gap: the signal comes from a hidden image that mail clients and security filters load on their own, so it reports readings that never happened. A download is a click that reached that person’s link. It is the smaller claim, and it is the one worth acting on.
- 198
- 39
- 3
- Idoia Zubeldia
- Rubén Alcaine
- Nadia Ferrer
Two hundred and forty badges, one afternoon, three addresses to fix
A professional congress prints its own credentials. The badge is the A6 PDF the designer delivered in July; what changes per person is the name, the organisation, whether they are speaking, and the registration reference the check-in app will read at the door. The list comes out of the registration form as an .xlsx, one row per attendee. A single run produces 240 PDFs and emails each to its own address. Six days later the report reads 198 downloaded, 39 delivered and not downloaded, and 3 bounced — so the week of the event opens with 39 reminders and 3 addresses to correct instead of a queue at the desk.
Change the PDF and the columns and the same run works for a training pass, a trade-fair credential or a staff card.
Nearby
The same machinery, seen from a different starting point:
Generating a PDF per spreadsheet rowSending a personalized PDF by emailPlacing fields on a PDF you already haveAPI reference