Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/centic9/poi-mail-merge

Small application which allows to repeatedely replace markers in a Microsoft Word document with items taken from a CSV/Microsoft Excel file to provide a simple mail-merge functionality
https://github.com/centic9/poi-mail-merge

Last synced: 2 days ago
JSON representation

Small application which allows to repeatedely replace markers in a Microsoft Word document with items taken from a CSV/Microsoft Excel file to provide a simple mail-merge functionality

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

        
[![Build Status](https://github.com/centic9/poi-mail-merge/actions/workflows/gradle-build.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/centic9/poi-mail-merge/actions)

[![Gradle Status](https://gradleupdate.appspot.com/centic9/poi-mail-merge/status.svg?branch=master)](https://gradleupdate.appspot.com/centic9/poi-mail-merge/status)



This is a small application which allows to repeatedly replace markers

in a Microsoft Word document with items taken from a CSV/Microsoft Excel 

file. 



I started this project as I was quite disappointed with the functionality 

that LibreOffice offers, I especially wanted something that is 

repeatable/automatable and does not produce spurious strange results and 

also does not need re-configuration each time the mail-merge is (re-)run.



## How it works



All you need is a Word-Document in "docx" format (>= 2003) which acts 

as template and an Excel .xls/.xlsx or CSV file which contains one row for 

each time the template-document should be produced.



The word-document can contain template-markers (enclosed in ${...}) for 

things that should be replaced, e.g. "${first-name} ${last-name}".



The first row of the first sheet of the Excel/CSV file is read as a 

header-row which is used to match the template-names used in the 

Word-template.



Only the first sheet of Excel files are read.



The result is a single merged Word-document which contains a replaced 

copy of the template for each line in the Excel file.



## Use it



### Grab and build it



    git clone https://github.com/centic9/poi-mail-merge.git

    cd poi-mail-merge

    ./gradlew installDist



### Run it



    ./run.sh   



### Sample files



There are some sample files in the directory `samples`, you can run these 

as follows



    ./gradlew installDist

    build\install\poi-mail-merge\bin\poi-mail-merge.bat samples\Template.docx samples\Lines.xlsx build\Result.docx



on Unix you can use the following steps



    ./gradlew installDist

    ./run.sh samples/Template.docx samples/Lines.xlsx build/Result.docx

	

## Support this project



If you find this tool useful and would like to support work on it, you can [Sponsor the author](https://github.com/sponsors/centic9)



## Tips



### Convert to PDF



You can use the tool ```unoconv``` from OpenOffice/LibreOffice to further 

convert the resulting docx, e.g. to PDF:



    unoconv -vvv --timeout=60 --doctype=document --output=result.pdf result.docx



## Known issues



### Only XLS/XLSX and one CSV format supported



For XLS/XLSX files only the first sheet is read and

headers are expected to be in the first row with data starting

in the second row.



For CSV, currently only files which use comma as delimiter and double-quotes 

for quoting text are supported. Other formats require code-changes, but should 

be easy to do by adjusting the CSFFormat definition (this project uses 

[Apache Commons CSV](http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-csv/) for CSV handling).



### Only DOCX template format supported

 

The older .doc format is not supported as template document because this project 

makes heavy use of the internal XML format of DOCX files.



### High memory usage for large resulting files



The resulting output file is fully held in memory, so a very large number of

merged documents may cause very high memory usage and/or out-of-memory errors.



A streaming writing is currently not easy to support, but it should be possible

to add a mode of operation which writes separate files for the merged documents 

to overcome this limitation if necessary. Pull-requests highly welcome!



### Word-Formatting can confuse the replacement



If there are multiple formattings applied to a strings that holds a template-pattern, 

(e.g. if you make only half of the template-variable bold), the resulting 

XML-representation of the document might be split into multiple XML-Tags 

and thus might prevent the replacement from happening. 



A workaround is to use the formatting tool in LibreOffice/OpenOffice to ensure 

that the replacement tags have only one formatting applied to them. 



See centic9/poi-mail-merge#6 for possible improvements.



## Change it



### Create Eclipse project files



    ./gradlew eclipse



### Build it and run tests



    cd poi-mail-merge

    ./gradlew check jacocoTestReport



#### Licensing



* poi-mail-merge is licensed under the [BSD 2-Clause License].



[BSD 2-Clause License]: https://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php