Introducing Writer's new merge fields: add QR Codes and more

We’re making it easier than ever to add dynamic elements like QR codes, bar codes, and watermarks to your documents in bulk.

Denso Wave Inc. first came up with the concept of QR codes when searching for an easier and faster way to complete manual tasks, like tallying purchases at a cash register. A quick scan of one of these square-sized grids (or of similar bar codes) gives you access to any stored information like websites, product details, or locations, or lets you complete financial transactions easily.

The team behind Writer is happy to announce that you can now add QR codes and other special fields to your Writer documents. With this update, you can create custom documents with dynamic fields in bulk from a single platform.

Writer now offers four new special fields to streamline your bulk document process:

QR Codes

QR codes provide a direct link to the online world, offering countless possibilities to positively engage your users. With Writer, you can now generate unique QR codes without having to code or go through multiple complicated steps. Adding a QR code to a document is as easy as it gets. Once inserted, you can either give it a fixed value or use a dynamic field as its value—based on which custom QR codes will be automatically generated.

For example, imagine you’re hosting an event and want to send personalized badges to all your invitees. Map the QR code field to the column in your data source which lists the badge URLs. On merge, Writer will convert these badge URLs into QR codes and send it out with each invitation.

Bar codes

Nearly every product available for purchase today, from milk cartons to airline boarding passes, are marked with bar codes containing information for easy access and checkout. This dynamic component is also usually generated in bulk as printable labels or part of custom documents.

Similar to adding QR codes in Writer, you can now generate and add custom bar codes to bulk documents on merge. For instance, if you need to prepare invoices for 200 items sold, you can easily create and merge 200 unique bar codes to the respective invoices all at once.

Image and list fields

If you have multiple items in the same field, Writer makes it easy to present the items in a clean and legible list. For example, say you have your candidate’s skills separated by commas in your data source. With the Merge as List option, Writer will merge the array of skills into an easy-to-read list. Similarly, if you want to merge multiple images into one field, Writer will merge the images into a list as well.

Dynamic watermarks

We use these semi-transparent images or text to either protect our work or brand them. This update makes it easier for professionals handling a large number of documents everyday to watermark their documents all at once instead of editing each document manually.

Easily auto-generate your watermark fields in Writer based on a field in your data source. Say you want to send personalized documents to different companies using the respective company’s name as the document watermark. By using merge fields from your data source as the value for your watermark, each custom document generated on merge will have the respective company’s name as the watermark.

That’s not all! Click here to get the list of all the field types we’ve rolled out this month.

Let us know what you think about these new updates and how they help you handle everyday tasks. Drop us a comment below or write to us at support@zohowriter.com.

Happy writing!

Make Zoho do more for you: You can now use Writer, along with Sheet and Show, as part of our cloud office suite and other collaboration tools by signing up for Zoho Workplace or Zoho One.