Anyone with experience of the above ? If so, can I pick your brains ?

I help run a local Land Rover Owners Club & need to create individual, personalised "Membership Cards" for 200 plus members every year.
I know how to use Mail Merge to insert the Member Names from a Membership spreadsheet onto a MS Word Membership Card "template" and save the result as a single Adobe document.

The problem is that the standard Word Mail Merge will only create a single file with all "cards" as separate pages within the same document.
This would be OK if the cards were physically to be printed.
However, as I want to be able to email each individual their personalised card as a digital file, I need the cards as separate adobe files with a sensible filename (Eg their name).

Ideally, the most efficient solution would be :
1 - Use "Mail Merge" to create the individual files & send them in one go,
Possibly acceptable alternatives could be :
2 - Use Mail Merge to create the individual files for manual addition to separate emails.
3 - Use Mail Merge to create a single Adobe file, then use online software to "split" the single file into separate, uniquely named files for manual addition to separate emails.

Having spent many hours of research on Google I know MS Word can't achieve the preferred option 1 - BUT might be able to with some sort of "add-on" software.
There appear to be only a few options visible, but no useful user experience / reviews that I've found.
One "Add-On" option appears to be via the latest Adobe Acrobat DC software- needing an expensive monthly subscription - but again no user feedback that I can see. The subscription cost would exceed the savings we'd make by eliminating the physical cards !

Do any of you need to do anything similar and can recommend any solution ?
Or even suggest any that don't work well ?

Thanks in advance,
Paul Paul,
2001 Discovery 2 TD5, 211,000 miles & climbing
2006 FFRR TDV8 Vogue 145,000 miles & climbing
Member of Midland (Land) Rover Owners Club, www.mroc.co.uk

Sorry, no Microsoft/Adobe here, but...

This could easily be done using a Google Sheet, one sheet with members data, then set up another "sheet" as the membership card template, fill with data, and download as a pdf.

This could then be automated, to save all membership cards into a google drive folder (and if you wanted, to send an email to each member with their card attached) .
Experience is the only genuine knowledge, but as time passes, I have forgotten more than I can remember
Volvo V70 P2 2006 2.4 Petrol 170bhp Estate SE
MG Midget Mk1 1962

Previous: L322 Range Rover TDV8 3.6 2008; L322 Range Rover TD6 3.0 2002; P38A Range Rover V8 1999

Joe90,

thanks for the response !

I was definitely too focussed on using Microsoft Word.
I should have remembered Google has a MailMerge capability - as we use it for a different part of our Membership process that I didn't create
As you've said it would give the capability of creating unique pdfs and sending them out automatically via email.

I'll have to have a look at the flexibility of the .pdf creation part of the process to see how to use it. The rest I think I'm OK with.
I want to be able to add "Merge" fields over the top of a digital image that is the main card layout.

Thanks again,

Paul Paul,
2001 Discovery 2 TD5, 211,000 miles & climbing
2006 FFRR TDV8 Vogue 145,000 miles & climbing
Member of Midland (Land) Rover Owners Club, www.mroc.co.uk

You will probably need some google apps script in order to automate. Happy to help, it is my "thing"  .
Experience is the only genuine knowledge, but as time passes, I have forgotten more than I can remember
Volvo V70 P2 2006 2.4 Petrol 170bhp Estate SE
MG Midget Mk1 1962

Previous: L322 Range Rover TDV8 3.6 2008; L322 Range Rover TD6 3.0 2002; P38A Range Rover V8 1999

You can do this by creating a custom page size in Word, the size of the card. Do the normal layout work and the run mailmerge with Microsoft print to PDF. The routes to this vary between renditions of Word.

AJG BMW i3 Electric Car
2012 Full Fat RR 4.4 TDV8 (now gone)
2006 VW Touareg 3.0 TDi V6

A Galaxy,
unfortunately the MS Word Mail Merge will only create a single Adobe file with all the cards included as separate pages.

Joe90,
all working already using Google Sheets, Google Docs and using Document Studio as the Add-on to automate the "Card" creation and sending via email!
I now feel proud that it works, but stupid because I should have thought of it previously
Many thanks for the suggestion! Paul,
2001 Discovery 2 TD5, 211,000 miles & climbing
2006 FFRR TDV8 Vogue 145,000 miles & climbing
Member of Midland (Land) Rover Owners Club, www.mroc.co.uk

Glad you're sorted Pawl, my MSWORD is capable of creating separate documents and/or emailing them to different addresses, it's a while since I used it (I was membership secretary for a club), I moved on and used ACCESS to make a smoother more flexible system. BMW i3 Electric Car
2012 Full Fat RR 4.4 TDV8 (now gone)
2006 VW Touareg 3.0 TDi V6

There's a macro here which reads like it will work:

https://www.extendoffice.com/documents/wor...e-pdf.html

Looks like you can stop reading when it gets to the section "Split and save each page of a document as separate new documents" - I can't see the macro needing any plugins to work as it's just looping through the pages and saving them as PDF.

AJGalaxy,
with my version of MS Word and (free) Adobe Acrobat Reader I couldn't create separate adobe files.
From what I found on Google, it looked possible IF you subscribe to Acrobat DC for addition Mail Merge capabilities to integrate with Word - but I couldn't find any user reviews of how well it worked & at £130 or so per year subscription I decided it wasn't viable.
Adobe also don't help as you can't even get a free trial of Acrobat DC Standard, you can only get one for the even more expensive Acrobat DC Pro

Dommo,
I'd found a couple of Macro based solutions to add to Word - but couldn't find any user reviews.
The only option that appeared to get positive reviews was 1 developed by a Microsoft MVP - but would have needed paying for.

I was sure there would be some useful experience amongst this group to help point me in the right direction !

Thanks all  Paul,
2001 Discovery 2 TD5, 211,000 miles & climbing
2006 FFRR TDV8 Vogue 145,000 miles & climbing
Member of Midland (Land) Rover Owners Club, www.mroc.co.uk

 .
Experience is the only genuine knowledge, but as time passes, I have forgotten more than I can remember
Volvo V70 P2 2006 2.4 Petrol 170bhp Estate SE
MG Midget Mk1 1962

Previous: L322 Range Rover TDV8 3.6 2008; L322 Range Rover TD6 3.0 2002; P38A Range Rover V8 1999