Mail merge with RMarkdown

This article is reposted from citizen-statistician.org with the kind permission of Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel.

The term “mail merge” might not be familiar to those who have not worked in an office setting, but here is the Wikipedia definition:

Mail merge is a software operation describing the production of multiple (and potentially large numbers of) documents from a single template form and a structured data source. The letter may be sent out to many “recipients” with small changes, such as a change of address or a change in the greeting line.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_merge

The other day I was working on creating personalized handouts for a workshop. That is, each handout contained some standard text (including some R code) and some fields that were personalized for each participant (login information for our RStudio server). I wanted to do this in RMarkdown so that the R code on the handout could be formatted nicely. Googling “rmarkdown mail merge” didn’t yield much (that’s why I’m posting this), but I finally came across this tutorial which called the process “iterative reporting”.

Turns our this is a pretty straightforward task. Below is a very simple minimum working example. You can obviously make your markdown document a lot more complicated. I’m thinking holiday cards made in R…

All relevant files for this example can also be found here.

## Packages
library(knitr)
library(rmarkdown)
 
## Data
personalized_info <- read.csv(file = "meeting_times.csv")
 
## Loop
for (i in 1:nrow(personalized_info)){
 rmarkdown::render(input = "mail_merge_handout.Rmd",
 output_format = "pdf_document",
 output_file = paste("handout_", i, ".pdf", sep=''),
 output_dir = "handouts/")
}

RMarkdown: mail_merge_handout.Rmd

---
output: pdf_document
---
 
```{r echo=FALSE}
personalized_info <- read.csv("meeting_times.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
name <- personalized_info$name[i]
time <- personalized_info$meeting_time[i]
```
 
Dear `r name`,
 
Your meeting time is `r time`.
 
See you then!

Save the Rmd file and the R script in the same folder (or specify the path to the Rmd file accordingly in the R script), and then run the R script. This will call the Rmd file within the loop and output 20 PDF files to the handouts directory. Each of these files look something like this

A sample mail

with the name and date field being different in each one.

If you prefer HTML or Word output, you can specify this in the output_format argument in the R script.