 I'm going to show you how to do a mail merge in Google Documents or Slides. So there's two tools you're going to need. You'll first need a document template. So something that you've already created that you want data to merge into. So here's a real basic example. I just want a hey there and I want the person's name to come in and I have a couple pieces of data down here and I also will be assigning them a group. So I just basically put some places in. This is the document I want all of the data that I am recording to go into. So you have a document. This can also be done in Google Slides but you also need to have a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet's what's going to pull the data from. That's where it's all going to come from. So here's the most important thing. You have to have both a spreadsheet and a document or a slide and these headers across the top have to match exactly what you're going to put into your document. For example, I want the person's name to appear here. So what I have to do is put these two little brackets and then the heading of that column for my spreadsheet with two closed brackets. So if I went to my spreadsheet you would see I have the word name. That's my first header and that's going to import all of the student's names. In my document I just have to put bracket, bracket, the header, bracket, bracket. So here's another example. I have data one. So if I went into my spreadsheet that's going to pull the information down here. So Billy Bob for data one has a 23, for data two has a 52. When I run the merge those numbers that data is going to go right into here into this area. So the most important thing is your spreadsheet headers have to match exactly what's inside your brackets within your template. So once you've created your template and you've put the bracket, bracket, put the name of what you want, you're ready to go. So you've got both of these things going. You go back to your spreadsheet. Now if you've used Microsoft Office you always worked from the document and then you would select a spreadsheet to pull the data from. The difference with Google is we work out of the spreadsheet. So I have to go to the spreadsheet that I have all of my data in and I have to use the add-ons feature. So the first time you do this you're going to go right up here towards the top where it says add-ons. You'll click and you may not have as many as me but down at the bottom you need to click on the get add-ons button. Once that loads you will search for Autocrat and it will be this one right here and the icon has changed recently. It used to be a gray kind of computer little guy but now it's this yellow box. So you'll just click it and install. Now mine's already installed so I don't have to worry about doing it but you'll have a big install button. So once you have it installed you'll be all set. Go back to your spreadsheet. Click the add-ons button. Go down to where you find Autocrat and the very first time you do it I believe this says launch. Now I've already run it on the spreadsheet before so mine says open but yours will say launch. So I'll click the launch or the open button so you won't have anything here. You go down to the red button down here it says new job. Click on new job and these are the steps that you'll have to go through to create a new merge job. So you can name this anything. I'm just going to name this merge demo one. You can name it whatever you want it doesn't really matter. That's just the title so you know what kind of a merge you're running and you'll have to do this on every single spreadsheet you do. Every time you load Autocrat you'll get to create a new merge job. Once you have the job done you can go back to that spreadsheet and use the same job over and over again you just need to create it. So I'll go to the next button and this is asking me okay so I have your spreadsheet where do you want me to push all of the data from your spreadsheet? What document or slide do you want me to push that to? So I have one called Autocrat demo. Basically if you've never used this before you'll go to my drive you'll search wherever you have that template that we made remember this template that we made in that document. You just need to find it. Now mine I recently used so it makes it really easy I can just say yep that's the one I want I want to use it. So once you've found the template you want you hit the next button and this is where it says okay in the spreadsheet we're in which tab and those are the tabs down here at the bottom do you want to use? Well my tab is tab one the one I want to use so I click that little box choose sheet one. Then it's going to ask what row are your headers in? And my headers are in right over here row one so that's good and my first piece of data starts on row two. You can choose what your headers are in which row you start on but generally when you make these I tend to just put the headers at the top first piece of data underneath and I'm only using the spreadsheet to pull the data from but you might have one that maybe your headers on row 18 and your data starts on row 19 so mine's perfectly fine how it is. Then you just need to double check that your headers match what you made in the brackets so like I have name maps to this column name the data one data one this is 99.9% of the time perfectly fine. The only time there might be an issue is if maybe you put a space somewhere or you did something slightly different so because I made sure that the headers matched exactly what I wanted pulled in here the name of them here I'm not going to have any problems click the next button. Now I need to name this file so when it gets merged it's going to make either a brand new document or a PDF what do I want that name so when I find it in my job I'm just going to call this merged one. Now here's where you get to make some decisions and it will also affect the naming process. I want all of my files to come in as a Google document because maybe I want to tweak something in them a little bit later. Your other option is also a PDF and that's a great way if you want to give parents a report or kids a report on something you can do it as a PDF send it to them and you're done nothing to worry about. If you might want to edit it or kind of look at it or use it in a document format you would choose a Google Doc so it doesn't matter which one you use mine all depends on what I'm doing with it I'm just going to give someone a copy of something I always choose PDF but if there's a chance I might want to tweak it or maybe put something in it or make a comment somewhere I'll just do a document but here's where you make the decision of how do I want these printed or saved to my drive. I have the choice of multiple outputs so in my spreadsheet over here on the left hand side you can see I have four kids that are going to get a document. If I use this multiple output mode I'm going to get a separate document for Billy Bob a separate document for Sally one for Joey and one for Markey that's what I want because I don't want Billy to see the other students scores if I choose single output it puts them all into one document now that's great for printing because then I get one document I click print and I can do a hard copy but if I want people to have a copy of it for my drive I would always choose multiple if you choose multiple you will want to change the file name and the reason is what I'm going to have is four files called merge one I'm not going to know whose file it is wouldn't it be great if I could put the kids name in the name of the file that shows up my drive well you can this blue bar right here shows you all the merge files that you have listed in your spreadsheet so one of them happens to be name remember this one right here says name has their name so if I go into my file name and I do bracket bracket name I'm gonna get Billy Bob merged one Sally Sue merged one Joey Johnson merged one all those individual files in my job and my drive so if I want individual files always choose multiple output if you're gonna just print something or you just want to collect the data have it in a document then you would choose single and if I choose single I just take the name part back out and if you choose single you can have it so that every single kids data is on a separate document so that would be the page break so generally if you're printing something this is the look that you want whether it's a document or a PDF it doesn't matter you want single output with page breaks if you're sending it to kids individually you want multiple output and you want to put their name in the top so those are the two ways you're gonna do it and for ease today I'm just going to do single output with page breaks so once you made your decision you've named it you click next now I need to choose where do I want to put this the biggest thing I can tell you is keep your drive organized whatever folder you have these two files in the template that you have and the spreadsheet put your merged files in that makes it a lot easier so I'll just say choose folder and I made a folder called demo autocrat so I already know the name of the folder I'm gonna select that I've chosen where my files are going to go you can click the next button dynamic folder don't even worry about this we're just doing the basics here merge condition you don't need that and share and send emails you don't need that and basically triggers you don't what's cool about triggers and I'm only gonna say this because this is something you may want to consider in the future if you're using a Google form and kiddos or somebody submits a form you can set autocrat to automatically send them an email with their document once that that form is submitted so it's a really cool way to do that but we're not gonna talk about that right now so just hit the save button and then what we've done is we've made our job so I've made this job and it's called merge demo one so I could go back out if I want go back to my spreadsheet enter in my data tweak it what I want and I'm ready to merge these documents so I'll go back up to add-ons I go down to autocrat go over to open and if you followed all those steps in your own you only have one job I have two only because I had one pre-existing I'm gonna go to that merge demo one and now I have to do is hit this play button right here in the middle so I hit play it's going to start running and it will show you its progress and when it says four rows will be merged and then it's going to say finishing up and now it's going to say it's done when I close this out you're gonna see on my spreadsheet now these columns just got imported with data and what that means is it's showing you a link to that document and showing you that it's done so if I were to go over here and because I chose single output see how all of these are the same name that's because I made one document for everybody's if you would have done the multiple output each one of these would have the kids name and the name of the file so they'd have their own individuals so it's a great way to do things to share it individually but I was just doing it for ease today when I click that link and I can open it here's what I've made alright so here's my document and you can see it's put the kiddos names in it the data that I wanted and the group that I assigned them and because once again I did single output if I scroll down there's student one I'd made a page break there's student two there's student three and there's student four so like I was saying earlier though if you would have done multiple output you would then have four separate documents each kid having their own which then you could share to them individually but for me I was going to just you know imagine I was gonna print this out I wouldn't want to do multiple because then I have to print all four pages individually this way I can just hit print one time so super easy once you have it set up and once you do this a couple times it really really is pretty simple there is a little piece of advice that I'm going to give you though when you're done running a merge Google likes to put all of this back in the same folder like when we ran that merge and it goes into that folder the problem is if I have all those folders named the same which is what I would probably do I now have this merge one in here and if I run it again I already have a merge one in there and Google kind of freaks out sometimes so you can see I have this merged one if I were to run it again Google doesn't necessarily know what to do with that so when you're done with this file you've printed it and you're really done with it what I would recommend doing is I delete them out of my drive get it out so now it's gone also make sure that you go back to your spreadsheet and I know this sounds strange but you need to take all of the data that it created and I just click on this G and I just drag over and I hit the delete button I remove all those links when I run AutoCrat sometimes and it already has that information in those reports don't get generated for some reason so every time I run this every time I run AutoCrat I just delete those columns just delete the data in them and I could go right back in hit AutoCrat open it back up hit play and I can run it again so it really is once you have the job set up it's as simple as going back hitting the play button closing out AutoCrat and you're ready to rock and roll I can go back to my folder again and you're gonna have that merged one in there again now the reason it's there again is because I deleted the first one now if you went in and you can edit your last run AutoCrat I could go in here and rename that file by clicking the edit button and going next a couple of times until I get back to the name and I could name it something different so for example merged all and now I want to change this back to multiple so I'll just show you what happens when I do a multiple one and I'm gonna put their name I'm gonna save it now because I'm running AutoCrat again remember every time you run AutoCrat you need to delete these columns out so I'm just gonna highlight this hit delete go back hit add-ons AutoCrat open now I can go ahead and hit run and close that out and now you will see the names of those files because now they're individual because I did multiple each kiddo gets their own you can see the file name so the easy way now is I could just click Billy Bob's open it up and there's his data or I could go back to my drive and then you will see there's joey's markies sally's and Billy's but remember if I were to run it again I would want to delete all of those files out of my drive and delete those columns out there you go play around you'll figure it out it really isn't as hard as me as I made it look or as it sounds