Mail Merge Text Generator

About the Mail Merge Text Generator

Write a message once with placeholders such as {{Name}} and {{Date}}, paste your list (or open a CSV, TSV or Excel file), and get one finished message per row: thank-you notes, reminders, invitations, letters, certificate wording, WhatsApp or SMS texts, or SQL statements. Every result can be previewed row by row, copied, or downloaded as one text file, a CSV with a new column, a zip with one file per row, or a Word document with one page per row.

Before you send anything, the page lists what would go wrong: placeholders that match no column (with the nearest column name and a one-click fix), rows where a value is empty, and rows with too many or too few fields. Your data stays in your browser — nothing is uploaded and nothing is sent.

Common uses

• Writing personalised reminders, invitations and thank-you messages for a list of people.
• Preparing the wording of certificates, ID cards or letters from a class or staff list.
• Making WhatsApp, SMS or email texts to paste one by one — nothing is sent from this page.
• Turning spreadsheet rows into SQL INSERT or UPDATE statements, JSON lines or HTML snippets.
• Creating one text file per customer, student or product with a zip download.

Placeholders

• {{Column}} — the value from that column. Names match without regard to capitals, spaces, hyphens or underscores, so {{first_name}} finds a column called First Name.
• {{Column|fallback}} — the fallback text when the cell is empty.
• {{Column:upper}}, :lower, :title (Each Word Capitalised), :trim (extra spaces removed) and :first (the first word) change the value; they combine with a fallback: {{Name:title|Friend}}.
• {{#}} — the row number: 1 for the first data row.
• \{{ — two literal braces, when you need them in the text.

A placeholder that matches no column is kept visible in the results (or left out, if you choose) and listed with the nearest column name.

Data formats

CSV and TSV are read as RFC 4180 describes: a value in double quotes may contain the separator, line breaks and quotes written twice ("say ""hi"""). If a quote is never closed, everything after it would become one value, so the page says on which line that quote opens. Commas, semicolons, tabs and pipes are detected automatically, and rows copied from Excel or Google Sheets arrive as tab-separated text. Excel (XLSX, XLS) and OpenDocument (ODS) files are read on your device; the first sheet is used, with values formatted as the spreadsheet shows them, so dates and amounts look the same. Files that are not UTF-8 are read as Windows-1252, and the page says so.

Escaping values

Escaping changes only the values that are inserted, never the template. SQL strings doubles single quotes (O'Brien → O''Brien), the standard SQL way to put a quote inside a string literal — keep the quotes around the placeholder in your template. MySQL / MariaDB strings also doubles every backslash: MySQL and MariaDB read \ as an escape character unless the NO_BACKSLASH_ESCAPES mode is on, so backslashes in a value would otherwise be dropped (\T is read as T), and one at the end of a value such as C:\Temp\ would escape the closing quote and break the statement (MySQL 8.4 manual, String Literals). HTML writes & < > " and ' as entities, so names cannot break your markup. JSON strings escapes quotes, backslashes and line breaks for use inside "…". CSV fields puts a value in double quotes (with any quote inside written twice) when it contains a comma, semicolon, tab, pipe, quote or line break, whichever separator your data used.

Limitations

• Up to 50,000 rows and 50 million characters of results at a time; split bigger lists.
• The results are plain text. The Word download puts each one on its own page in one font, ready to format, print or save as PDF in your word processor.
• Only the first sheet of a workbook is read; save other sheets as CSV. Formulas show their last calculated value.
• This page writes the messages; it does not send emails or texts.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.