Autocrat: Sheets and Docs Playing Together

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Well, in my case, necessity was the mother of desperation. You see, I recently gave a presentation on Google Classroom to my colleagues. Each of the participants had a Chromebook with which to participate in the session (you'll see why this was a good idea in a second).

At the conclusion of the session, I wanted to send the attendees a certificate of completion but wasn't exactly sure how I could quickly do that. The operative word being "quickly." I didn't want to invest a bunch of time writing their names into each individual document, and then mailing it to each individual, one by one.  Then I remembered "Autocrat."

I had heard of Autocrat some months ago but didn't truly appreciate the power of it until I attended a Google Summit session on Autocrat. I thought, *I could use Autocrat to generate a certificate and email it to the attendees! This is great! I could continue to show the power of Google apps for education long after the session was over!*

To those not familiar with Autocrat, it can best be explained as being a Google Sheets add-on that can take data from a Google Sheet and merge it into a Google Doc.  If you're familiar mail merge, then you get what Autocrat is all about.

At the conclusion of the session, I had asked the attendees to fill out a Google Form on the session (this is where the Chromebooks came in handy). Some of the more important information I could use in order to send the certificates were their names and email addresses. Using that information and Autocrat, I prepared the certificates and wowed my attendees.

One of the cool things was that after telling them how I put together the certificates, many became even more interested in using Google Apps such as Docs and Sheets in their classroom.

If your looking for an easy way to merge information from a Google Sheet into a Google Doc, Autocrat is the way to go!