4. Use Yet Another Mail Merge for advanced customization

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Note: it is now possible to edit the subject and body of emails sent directly in Form Publisher. Follow the tutorial below only if you need advanced customization (use an alias, add images,...).

Introduction to advanced customization with YAMM

To customize email notifications, you can use the mail merge add-on Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM) in combination with Form Publisher. YAMM will let you write your own text and even add informations coming right from the form, just like in this example:

Configuring Form Publisher

Open your Google Form (in edition mode) then click on the menu 'Add-ons > Form Publisher > Destination folder & naming convention':

A sidebar will appear. Then select the option 'Save generated file URL in the spreadsheet containing your form responses'. This will let YAMM reuse the files generated by Form Publisher to send them by email:

You also need to disable the automated email from Form Publisher, as you will send the emails through YAMM and you don't want people to receive multiple / duplicated emails!

Go to 'Add-ons > Form Publisher > 'Notification rules':

• • Leave the 'PDF recipients (email addresses)' field empty

  • Check 'Keep a copy of PDF in Drive'. Again this is mandatory if you want YAMM to be able to retrieve the file created by Form Publisher.

Writing the draft in Gmail

Yet Another Mail Merge lets you create your email template as a draft in Gmail, in the same way that Form Publisher lets you use a Google Doc or a Google Sheet as a template. So go to Gmail and create a new draft. You can insert images and use all formatting options available in Gmail.

If you want to reuse data filled by the user in Google Form, you can add markers in this draft template, like you do with Form Publisher.

For more information about how Yet Another Mail Merge works, see our video tutorial.

Installing and configuring Yet Another Mail Merge

Go back to your form and display the responses spreadsheet:

Note that you can now see a column named '[Form Publisher] PDF URL':

To install Yet Another Mail Merge in this spreadsheet:

• • Go to the tab Add-ons > Get add-ons

  • Look for 'Yet Another Mail Merge' and install it

Once installed, go to the add-on menu and click on the option 'Configure form submission notifications'. A window will pop up to let you configure the mail merge process.

There are two options:

• Option 1: Notify one or more addresses of all responses

• The email will be sent to the address(es) you put in the recipients field of the Gmail draft.

• Option 2: Notify address submitted by the form

• The emails will be sent to the addresses submitted within the form. In that case, leave the recipients field empty in the Gmail draft, and select the recipients email addresses column from your responses spreadsheet.

In both cases, check the option to wait until a specific column is filled before sending the email, and select the PDF column. This option makes sure Form Publisher completed the process, and that the PDF has been correctly generated before sending the email.

Note: If you have existing data in this spreadsheet, Yet Another Mail Merge will only send emails for new responses / form submissions. If you want to send your emails to the existing recipients, simply delete the '0' from the 'Merge status' column, then open 'Configure form submission notifications' again to relaunch it. You can just close it after that.

The resulting notification

All done! You can try to submit a new form response and take a look at the email sent.

Other option / workflow: Control the PDF generated before sending the email

Yet Another Mail Merge can either automatically send emails right after a file has been generated by Form Publisher, or you can manually send those emails later, after reviewing the PDFs created.