How to do a mail merge without Word

People search for this for four reasons, and they are all practical: no Office licence, a Mac, a work laptop where macros are switched off, or Word on the web, which has no mail merge at all.

First, what you actually need

Strip the jargon and a mail merge is two files and one rule: a document with gaps in it, a table where each row fills the gaps once. Everything below does that. They differ in what they cost you to set up and what comes out the other end.

LibreOffice Writer

Free, installs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and has a full mail merge wizard that reads .xlsx and .csv. It opens and writes .docx, so an existing Word template usually carries over.

Two things to know. It has the same core limitation as Word — the merge output is one long document, not one file per record. And complex Word layouts sometimes shift slightly on the way in, so check a page before you trust 200.

Google Docs plus an add-on

Google Docs has no built-in mail merge. Add-ons in the Workspace Marketplace fill the gap, and several will write one document per row into Drive. Good if your data already lives in Sheets.

The trade-offs: the add-on needs access to your documents and spreadsheets to work, which is its own approval conversation in a company; free tiers are usually capped at a few dozen rows a day; and output is Google Docs files, so Word formatting can drift.

Writing it yourself

If you are comfortable with code, this is a couple of dozen lines. Python with docxtpl or python-docx, or Node with docxtemplater, will loop a spreadsheet and stamp out one file per row, named however you like.

Worth it if this is a recurring job you can automate for good. Not worth it if you need 80 offer letters by Thursday and do not already have Python on the machine.

Do it in a browser tab

The reason this question gets asked so often is that all of the above ask you to install or authorise something. Docs from Excel does not: you upload a list to a web page, say what the documents are, and download the finished files.

• Template is a normal .docx, .pptx or .xlsx with {{placeholders}} typed where the variable text goes.
• Data is your existing .xlsx or .csv — no helper columns, no reformatting.
• Output is one separate file per row, Word or PDF, named from a column you choose.
• Nothing installed, no macros, no account, no access granted to your Drive or mailbox.

Files are processed and then deleted; they are not kept, read, or used to train anything.