Mail Merge

Mail merges are the classic that small clubs, property managers and businesses keep despairing over. The address list sits in Excel, the letter in a word processor, and somewhere in between the leading zero of the postcode, the umlauts or the salutation get lost. In the end "Sehr geehrte Frau ," is on the paper and half of the labels sit a centimetre too low. The mail merge turns this into three clear steps: recipients, letter, output.

In the first step you get the addresses. The tool reads a CSV file from Excel, LibreOffice or a club program tolerantly: semicolon, comma or tab, quotes, umlauts from old Excel versions, lost zeros in postcodes such as 04109. Excel files in .xlsx format work directly, and so do selected and copied cells. The tool guesses from the headings which column is first name, last name, company, street or town and shows it to you for checking. Columns it does not know, such as membership number or fee, become placeholders of their own.

If you work in a team on Werkzeu.ge, you often need no file at all. Contacts and companies come from the customer file with one click, employees with their home address from the Personarium. Your organisation's permissions apply: whoever cannot read there gets nothing here either, and the tool tells you why. The recipient list shows duplicates, missing streets or towns and postcodes without five digits before a single sheet is printed.

In the second step you write the letter once. Placeholders such as {Vorname}, {Nachname}, {Firma} or your own columns are replaced for every recipient. The tool builds the salutation line from the salutation column: "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Weber,", "Sehr geehrter Herr Kaya," or, if no salutation is known or diverse was entered, "Guten Tag Kim Berger,". Companies without a contact person get "Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,". If you prefer a warmer tone, choose "Liebe Frau" or first names. English letters get "Dear Ms" and "Dear Mr".

The sender comes from your Amtsprofil or from your organisation's invoice sender in Fakturen. The layout follows DIN 5008 Form B: address field 45 millimetres from the top, return address above it, information block on the right, fold and punch marks at the edge. So every letter fits the usual DL and C6/5 window envelopes. For recipients abroad the country is printed in capitals on the last line, the way the post office wants it. A preview shows you every single letter before you print.

In the third step you decide what you need: one PDF to print, single PDFs per recipient as a ZIP, or filing in the Aktenschrank in the Serienbriefe folder. For envelopes without a window there are address labels in four common A4 formats with 24, 21, 12 or 8 labels per sheet, with margins, offset and a test print for alignment, plus direct printing on DL and C6/5 envelopes. All PDFs are made in your browser. The addresses are not uploaded, and the recipient list disappears when you close the window. You remain responsible for using the addresses lawfully under the GDPR; the tool only typesets the letters and does not replace legal advice.