From Excel & Google Sheets
From Excel to finished badges, without touching mail merge
If your attendee list lives in a spreadsheet, you already have everything you need. Copy the columns, paste them into BonBadge: badges for the whole list generate in one go.
The classic route — a Word mail merge fed from Excel — works, but it makes you earn it: merge fields, label templates, previews that lie, and a layout that breaks the first time a name runs long. For badges, there’s a shorter path.
BonBadge reads your paste the way a person would: it spots the name column, the company column, the role column — header row or not, columns in any order, messy files welcome. You confirm the mapping at a glance on the live preview, and the PDF is ready.
CSV exports from registration tools — Eventbrite, Luma, Google Forms — import exactly the same way, no clean-up pass required.
Why mail merge fights you
Mail merge was built for form letters and address labels, and it shows the moment you point it at badges. The label templates are sticker-shaped, not badge-shaped. The font size is fixed, so a long name silently overflows — you find out on paper, after printing forty of them. The preview shows field codes half the time. And every change to the list means re-checking the merge from the top.
The paste route skips the machinery: the layout is already a badge, designed once by someone who obsessed over it. Text auto-sizes for long names, categories become colored chips, and the output is a calibrated PDF with crop marks. When the list changes, you paste again — a minute, not a do-over.
📋 Paste and go
Select your columns in Excel or Google Sheets, paste: detection sorts them out, and the preview shows you exactly what it understood.
🧹 Messy files welcome
With or without headers, columns in any order, empty cells here and there: the import copes, and you fix any mapping in one click.
🔄 List still moving?
Re-paste the updated list, re-download the PDF: one minute. No merge fields to re-check, no template to re-open.
How it works
Copy your columns
In Excel or Google Sheets, select the useful columns — name, company, role — and copy them. Or export a CSV.
Paste into BonBadge
Each column is identified automatically. If something lands wrong, you reassign it in a click and the preview updates instantly.
Download the PDF
Pick a template, add your logo and colors, download: one badge per attendee, print-ready.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to clean up my spreadsheet first?
No. Paste your columns as they are: names, companies, roles and categories are detected with or without a header row, in any order. You check the result on the live preview before downloading anything.
First and last names are in separate columns — is that a problem?
No — they’re recombined automatically into a single name on the badge. A lone “Name” column works just as well.
How is this different from a Word mail merge?
There are no merge fields to configure and no label template to hunt down. The layout is already badge-shaped, text auto-sizes so long names fit, and the PDF comes out calibrated with crop marks. What takes an afternoon in Word takes five minutes here.
Does Google Sheets work too?
Yes — copy-paste from Google Sheets behaves exactly like Excel. So does any CSV, whichever tool exported it.
What happens to my spreadsheet data?
It stays in your browser: import, preview and PDF generation all run locally, with nothing sent to a server. Close the tab and nothing remains.