Mail merge that ends in separate PDFs, one per person
A merge hands you one document with every letter inside it. Papely hands you one file per row, already addressed, already sent, and tells you what came back.
No credit card · 20 free documents a month
Convocatorias.docx
- Ada Lovelace
- Bruno Costa
- Carmen Ruiz
- Dolores Vega
convocatoria-dolores-vega.pdf
The merge is the easy half
Joining your list to your document is the part that already works, and it takes a minute. What takes the afternoon is everything after it: the merge finishes as a single file with all two hundred and forty notices one behind the other, so you export it, split it, give each piece a name somebody will recognise, and then attach them one at a time. Anyone who has done it twice has a folder of files called document-1, document-2 and a mail client that has stopped responding.
Where a merge stops, and what is still yours afterwards
Described plainly, because it is worth knowing which half you are actually buying. A mail merge does the joining. These four are the ones you do by hand today, and they are the four Papely takes.
one file, 240 pages
240 files, one recipient each
- Splitting it up
- The merge finishes as one document with the notices one behind the other. Papely produces the files separately in the first place, so there is nothing to cut.
- Naming each file
- Each file is named from the row it came from, so what lands in a mailbox is not document-97.pdf.
- Getting each one to its person
- The address is a column of your list, mapped once. Each recipient gets their own file, at their own address, in the same run that produced it.
- Knowing what arrived
- Every copy leaves as its own link, so it carries a state and a date: sent, delivered, bounced or downloaded. A folder of attachments carries none of that.
Four moves, and three of them happen once
The setup is a one-off. After that, a round of notices is importing a list and pressing send.
Upload the PDF you already have
Not a Word template — the document as it already looks, exported once from whatever you laid it out in. It goes up a single time and is reused every round, and the original page is not modified.
Place the fields
Drag each field where it belongs: the member's name, their reference, the date, whatever changes. Text, image, date, QR and table. Where you place it once is where every copy prints it.
Bring the list
The same one you point a merge at, as .xlsx or CSV — up to 500 rows and 100 columns. Your column names are matched to your field names once, plus the column that says where each copy goes.
Send, and read what comes back
One row becomes one PDF, addressed to one person, as its own link. Next round you swap the list and press send again.
The part a merge was never going to give you
A notice you sent as an attachment leaves and is never heard from again: you find out it arrived when somebody replies, and you find out nothing at all when nobody does. Because each copy travels as its own link, Papely keeps a line per recipient with four states and none of them invented.
There is no fifth state for “opened”. Papely does not report email opens, and that is deliberate: corporate mail scanners fetch a message's images before any human sees it, so the figure counts as read things nobody read. Four states that mean something are worth more than five where one of them lies.
- sent
- Papely handed the message over for delivery.
- delivered
- The receiving mail server accepted it.
- bounced
- It came back. The address is wrong or the mailbox is refusing it — worth knowing on a notice that has to reach everybody.
- downloaded
- Someone followed that person's link.
It stays your document, not a Word template
Nothing here asks you to rebuild the notice inside a new editor. What you upload is the PDF as it already looks — exported once from wherever you laid it out — and you mark the handful of places that differ from one person to the next: who it is addressed to, their reference, the date the round went out. The original page is not modified, and the layout you approved is the layout that arrives.
Two hundred and forty notices, one afternoon shorter
An association calls its annual meeting. The notice was laid out once and approved; the member list is the export it always was, one row per member with a name, a reference and an address. The run is one import and one send. Two hundred and forty PDFs leave, each named for its member and each to its own address, and the list fills in as the answers come back — including the four addresses that bounce, which get chased that same afternoon instead of surfacing as four people who say they were never called.
Two hundred and forty documents sits inside the 1,000 a month the Pro plan covers, at 19 € a month or 190 € a year; the free plan covers 20. One list can carry up to 500 rows.
Nearby
The same machinery, told from where you might be standing:
Generating a PDF per spreadsheet rowSending a personalized PDF by emailPlacing fields on a PDF you already haveAPI reference