By Aravindan Dhanapal | Automation

Mass Mail Merge Automation with PDF4me and Power Automate

Robotic process automation (RPA) is nowadays making organizations more profitable by eliminating a lot more routine manual processes. It also encourages customer satisfaction as it could make processes faster and more secure. PDF4me is also contributing to making a lot of document-related automation processes for its customers. One of the prime automation features from PDF4me is mail merge automation and the greatest advantage over many other is security. PDF4me processing all your sensitive data and document templates over the secure cloud storage and it automatically removes the processed files periodically as part of our data retention policy.

Mail Merge Automation

Merging your word template with dynamic data from various sources like Excel, Json, SharePoint, CRM, SAP and many more is now fully automated with PDF4me mail merge automation. This automation feature allows you to create multiple documents at once and send them for further approvals or you can even save them to your different storage destinations. There is a number of ways to accomplish this using Zapier connections, Microsoft Power Automate/ PowerApps, and PDF4me Rest API.

Choose right tool for the right action

We learned from various use cases and developed four different mail merge actions just to make sure the automation is so simple and easy to understand from an end-user perspective. All these actions are available in Zapier connections and Power Automate/PowerApps.

Mail Merge with Data File (List of Docs)
This action can produce multiple documents at once by accepting data as a file format only. The supported file formats are .xlsx and .json types as of now. The sample excel structure and JSON structure are shown in the images below.

Mail Merge with Data File (Single Doc)
This action can produce a single document at once by accepting data as a file format only. The supported file formats are .xlsx and .json types as of now.

Mail Merge with Data String (List of Docs)
This action produces multiple documents as output and accepts data as a string. This is an open option to users who can bring data from any source and prepare JSON structure as given below in the samples section.

Mail Merge with Data String (Single Doc)
This action produces a single document as output and accepts data as a string. This is an open option to users who can bring data from any source and prepare JSON structure as given below in the samples section.

Sample Data Structures

Sample JSON Structure (List Array):

[
  ["FieldName1", "FieldName2", "FieldName3"],
  ["FieldValue1", "FieldValue2", "FieldValue3"],
  ["FieldValue4", "FieldValue5", "FieldValue6"]
]

How does it work?

All you need to do is map your Data file content and Template file content from various apps from your Zapier or Power Automate connectors.

This action reads your data file and performs mail merge according to your Word/PDF template. It produces multiple document outputs in a single call. Also, it produces word output format for word templates and PDF file output for PDF templates. In case if you want to produce a PDF file for the word template, you can add the “Convert to PDF” action next to this Mail Merge action.

How does API costing work for Automation?

All the multiple document-producing actions are limited to 10 documents at a time for avoiding heavy workloads that could result in no output at times due to various network limitations.

All these actions are calculated 1 API Cost per call. Irrespective of how many documents it produces, we just account for it as one API cost per action.