Do I need a Word mail merge to print badges from Excel?

No. A mail merge exists because Word cannot read a spreadsheet on its own. Exporting to CSV and importing it directly skips Word entirely, and you see the finished badge before you print rather than a label grid that may or may not line up.

Does my spreadsheet get uploaded anywhere?

No. The file is read in your browser and never leaves your device. That matters for a staff list or a class register, which is exactly the kind of file people are asked to hand over to a badge site.

How many badges can I import at once?

Up to 5,000 rows. A few hundred is instant; a few thousand takes a moment to generate the PDF because every badge is drawn as real text rather than as an image.

Can I use an .xlsx file directly?

Not yet — export it as CSV first, which takes about ten seconds in Excel or Google Sheets. CSV also strips the formatting, formulas and hidden sheets that make an .xlsx import unpredictable.

My badges printed slightly too small. What happened?

The printer scaled the page. Print again with scaling set to 100% or Actual size. Browsers and PDF readers default to fitting the page inside the printer’s margins, which shrinks everything by three to five percent.

Guide · 5 min

How to print name badges from Excel

You have a spreadsheet of names and you need badges by tomorrow. Here is the short way, without a Word mail merge.

Import your spreadsheet

Opens the editor with a name tag ready. Your file stays in this browser.

The traditional answer to this is a Word mail merge against an Excel workbook, and it is genuinely awful: label templates that do not match the labels you bought, a preview that lies, and a first page that comes out half an inch off. The mail merge exists because Word cannot read a spreadsheet directly, not because it is a good way to make badges.

The short version is three moves. Save your sheet as CSV, import it, and tell the tool which column is the name. Everything below is those three moves with the parts that usually go wrong called out.

Get your spreadsheet into shape

One row per person, one header row at the top, and no merged cells. That is the whole requirement. The header names do not matter — "Full Name", "NAME" and "Attendee" all work, because you map the columns yourself in a moment.

The two things that actually break an import are a title row above the headers ("Q1 Attendee List" sitting in A1) and blank spacer rows between groups. Delete both. Everything else, including extra columns you do not need, is fine — you can simply not map them.

What a sheet should look like before you export it

Full Name,Job Title,Organization
Jane Smith,Head of Sales,Acme
John Brown,Staff Engineer,Acme
Sarah Jones,Marketing Lead,Northwind

Save it as CSV

In Excel: File → Save As, and pick CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) (.csv). Choose the UTF-8 version specifically. Plain "CSV (Comma delimited)" writes the file in a legacy Windows encoding, which is what turns Zoë into ZoÃ« and Müller into MÃ¼ller on the printed badge.

Excel will warn you that the workbook contains features that are not compatible with CSV, and that only the active sheet will be saved. Both are fine. Make sure the sheet you want is the one in front of you before you save.

1Click the tab of the sheet with your list on it.
2File → Save As, and choose a folder you can find again.
3Set the format to CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) (.csv).
4Save, and accept the warning about only the active sheet being kept.

Google Sheets: File → Download → Comma-separated values (.csv). It is UTF-8 already, so there is nothing to choose.

Import it and map the columns

Open the editor, go to the People tab and choose Import CSV. Drop the file in. The first thing you see is your own header row with a guess beside each column: "Full Name" is already pointing at the badge’s name field, "Organization" at company.

Check the guesses and change anything that is wrong. Columns you do not want on the badge get set to "Don’t import" — the file can have thirty columns and the badge can use three. Then look at the preview table underneath: it shows the first rows exactly as they will be read, which is where you catch a shifted column before you print sixty of them.

Check the longest name before you print

This is the step everybody skips and it is the one that costs a re-print. Sort the people list by name length in your head — or just look for the longest one — select that person, and look at the badge on the canvas.

Text set to fit shrinks itself until it fits its box, so a very long name will still print. What you are checking is whether it has shrunk so far that it is smaller than the job title underneath it, which looks like a mistake even though it is not.

Print the sheet

Go to the Print tab. Pick US Letter or A4, set the margins your printer can actually reach, and turn on cut marks if you are trimming by hand. The preview shows exactly what will come out, page by page.

Then either print from the browser or download the PDF. Whichever you choose, set the printer’s scaling to 100% or "Actual size". "Fit to page" shrinks the sheet by a few percent to clear the printer’s own margins, and a 3 × 2 inch badge printed at 96% no longer fits a 3 × 2 inch holder.

Scaling: 100% or Actual size. Never Fit to page.
Turn on "Background graphics" if your badge has a coloured band, or it prints as white paper.
Print one page first, hold it against a holder, and only then print the rest.

If something looks wrong

Almost every import problem is one of four things, and all four are visible in the preview table before you commit.

Every badge shows the same name — two columns were mapped to the same field. Check the mapping list for a duplicate.
Accented letters are mangled — the file was saved as plain CSV rather than CSV UTF-8. Re-export it.
One giant column instead of several — the file is semicolon-delimited, which is normal for European Excel. Re-import it; the delimiter is detected automatically.
A blank badge at the end — a trailing empty row in the sheet. Rows with nothing in any mapped column are skipped, and the count tells you how many.