A .xlsx or .csv with one row per person — a name column, plus a course/event column and a date column if you want them printed. Parsed in your browser; nothing uploads.
2
Check the names it found
The tool shows how many rows it read. The name comes from a Recipient, Attendee, Student, Participant, or Name column — first match wins.
3
Generate the certificates
One landscape PDF per person: a double-ruled border, the recipient's name rendered large and centered, the course and date lines beneath, and signature and date lines at the bottom.
A worked example: a 30-attendee course
Your course wrap-up sheet is attendees.xlsx: 30 rows with columns Attendee, Course, and Date completed. One run produces 30 landscape certificates. Each reads “This is to certify that”, the attendee's name large and centered, then “has successfully completed Workplace First Aid — Level 2” and “on 2026-08-07” from that row's Course and Date columns, with signature and date lines at the bottom. All 30 arrive in one zip.
Different course names in the column? Each certificate prints its own row's value — one list can cover several courses in a single run.
Constraints & edge cases
What happens with very long names?
+
The name renders on one centered line at a large size. A name too wide for the page is shortened with an ellipsis rather than wrapped or shrunk — so for names past roughly 40 characters, check the output before printing. Editing the cell to a preferred short form is the reliable fix.
Are accents and non-Latin alphabets supported?
+
Certificates use the built-in PDF Times fonts, which cover Western European accents (é, ü, ñ, ç, å) fine. Characters outside that range — Polish ł, Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese — are replaced with ? in this version. Run a one-row test with your most accented name before generating the full class.
How do serial numbers work?
+
Numbering lives in the filename, not on the certificate face. Files default to row-1.pdf, row-2.pdf in list order; on Pro you can name each file from a column — a Certificate ID column plus the pattern {Certificate ID}.pdf gives you a gap-free, auditable file sequence. Printing a serial on the certificate itself is not in this version.
What about duplicate names in the list?
+
Every row generates its own certificate — two attendees named Maria Silva each get one. Only the filenames deduplicate, as "Maria Silva.pdf" and "Maria Silva (2).pdf", so no file overwrites another.
Is a 30-person course free?
+
Each run covers the first 20 rows free, unlimited runs, no signup. A 30-attendee list in one run needs Pro ($12/mo, unlimited rows) — or run it as two free batches.
How to make certificates from an Excel list, by hand
This is mail merge with a design attached, and the design is what makes the manual route harder than it looks — certificates are landscape, positioned, and usually branded, so small layout drift is very visible across a batch.
Word mail merge onto a certificate templateHalf an hour to set up, then the same split problem as any merge
1Start from a landscape Word document with your certificate design as a background or a full-page image.
2Use Mailings → Start Mail Merge → Letters, and select your Excel list of names.
3Place the name field in a centred text box so it sits in the same position on every certificate.
4Finish & Merge → Edit Individual Documents, then export to PDF.
Where it breaks. Same wall as every mail merge: one combined document, not one file per person. On top of that, a centred text box does not keep long names looking right — a name twice the length of the others will either overflow or re-wrap, and you will not notice until you scroll the merged document.
PowerPoint plus a macroAn hour, better looking results
1Build the certificate as a single PowerPoint slide, which gives more reliable control over placement than Word.
2Write a macro that loops your Excel list, sets the name placeholder, and exports each slide to its own PDF.
Where it breaks. Better design control, same maintenance cost, and PowerPoint's export sizing needs pinning explicitly or the PDFs come out at slide dimensions rather than a paper size.
Canva Bulk CreateTwenty minutes, on a paid plan
1Design the certificate in Canva and add a text field where the name goes.
2Open Apps → Bulk Create and upload your list as a CSV, or paste the data in directly.
3Connect the CSV column to the text field, then generate — Canva produces one page per row.
4Download the result as PDF.
Where it breaks. Bulk Create is a Pro feature, so this route has a subscription attached. The download is one multi-page PDF by default rather than separate named files, and the per-page split is manual afterwards. Your recipient list is also uploaded to Canva, which is worth a thought when the list is students, patients or staff.
Windows and Mac
All three routes behave the same on Windows and Mac, with one caveat inherited from mail merge generally: the Windows-only Word add-ins that solve the one-file-per-record problem have no Mac equivalent, so on a Mac the macro is the only route to separate files.
For a class of fifteen, merge-then-export is a perfectly good afternoon's work and you do not need anything else. Three things make it unpleasant at a hundred: filenames that have to be typed by hand, long names quietly breaking the layout, and the fact that none of it is reusable next term — you start again from the merged document every time.