EDocGen Many to One Mail Merge Online

Mail merge service

EDocGen online Mail merge is one of the most sought-after features. It addresses many limitations of Microsoft mail merge. But it's the ability to merge multiple excel rows into a single Word document, termed as many to one mail merge, that stands out.

Mail merge in MS Word performs a one-to-one merge by default and produces one document for every row of excel. Imagine you are creating a sales performance report. If you have 5 sales reps and each rep closed 5 deals, when you do a mail merge, you create 25-word documents instead of 5 - one for each sales rep.

Start Online Mail Merge

EDocGen supports the dynamic population of Excel data into Microsoft Word and templates for document generation. You can download the generated documents or let the system auto-send them to individual recipients, from your business email.

For many-to-one mail merge, the system groups the Excel data before performing the merge. For users, all these complexities are hidden with a simple-to-use interface. For them, it's another regular online mail merge.

Before explaining how to go about online directory merge with EDocGen, let’s explore a couple of use cases.

Many to one mail merge - Use Cases

You can see lots of use cases for this problem in your business. There is no fun in manually creating documents when mail merge doesn’t support your requirements.

John is a service manager and his team members visit customer businesses 4 times a month for reviewing and providing services. At the end of the month, he sends letters to his customers, informing them of all the visits his service reps made for that month and thanking the customer. Regular mail would generate 4 documents for each customer. Certainly, it’s a no-go for John, and is currently manually updating word docs.

Jane is a VP of a medium-sized organization. She regularly submits compliance documents in state-prescribed formats. Any deviations in the formats are not accepted in the submission. Her team gathers the data from the data warehouse and manipulates it using the BI solution. Her BI reporting tool cannot support the document format and she uses mail merge. But instead of creating a proper document, it generates a page for every row, leaving her editing hundreds of word documents manually.

Many to One Mail Merge - Solution options

There are quite a few good solutions out there. If you Google the keywords “Mail Merge Multiple Rows into One Document“ or “Directory Mail Merge”, you find many to one mail merge add-ins from Graham Mayor and Doug Robbins. Both are excellent with a small learning curve. But remember, these are add-ins. Some organizations have strict policies around add-ins for security reasons. Moreover, these approaches require IT help.

If the above options are not for you, EDocGen online mail merge is the best choice. It is built for business users. You can use your existing Excel file and MSWord template as-is, without any changes.

Mail Merge Multiple Rows into One Document

Upload your Word template into the system. Let me explain the document generation from it with an example.

Following is the excel file for many to one mail merge. This sample file has 3 customers, each one receiving a different set of products.

1. Customer1 receives product 1 &2
2. Customer2 receives product 1
3. Customer3 receives product 1, 2 &3

Step1: Upload the spreadsheet.

In the system, choose the "document creation from the Excel" option and upload your file. Select the sheet from, which you want to populate data.

Step2: Map the fields.

In the mapping screen, you can map the dynamic fields to the excel column headers. You can skip this step if the tag names match with Excel headers. In this case, the system auto-maps the fields for you.

Step3: Populate the MSWord template with excel.

Click generate to create 3 documents corresponding to 3 customers. Each of them contains the respective products they receive and the invoice amounts. Please refer to Excel to Word for more details on the online mail merge.

While this is a simple example to show how the system works, you can accomplish many complex scenarios.

1. Use conditional statements, paragraphs, and subtemplates to create customized document formats.
2. You can populate multiple tables in your template.
3. The software supports multi-lingual document generation.
4. You can include calculations in the templates. The system computes the values and displays them in the document.
5. Auto-fill images, QR codes, and barcodes into the document.

Apart from supporting many to one mail merge, it supports the population of vertical orientations of excel data. Unlike mail merge, it retains your exact formatting of numbers and dates as in excel.

If you have Total fields in your template, you would like to sum the corresponding excel values for each customer. You can't perform this inside Excel. The system does this for you.

Step4: Document Distribution.

This is an optional step. It's difficult to manually send the generated documents to individual recipients. As in the mail merge, the system provides you an option to auto-send them from your business email. You can send them as PDF/Word attachments or include them in the mail body as Image/HTML. You can also customize the email body and subject.

The other distribution channels include

1. Create a print-ready file.
2. Sync them to document management systems such as SharePoint.
3. Saving to cloud storage such as OneDrive.

As you can see, EDocGen is the simplest and fastest solution for online many to one mail merge. Register and start performing many to one mail merge.