How to make a certificate template in Google Slides and fill it from Sheets

Google Slides is free, most people already know it, and a single slide makes a decent certificate template. Add the Autocrat add-on to Google Sheets and you can fill that template with every name on your participant list. Here is how to set it up, and what it leaves for you to do afterwards.

Step 1: Build the template in Google Slides

1. Create a new presentation and delete everything except one slide.
2. Go to File and then Page setup. Choose Custom and enter a certificate size, for example A4 landscape (29.7 x 21 cm) or US Letter landscape (11 x 8.5 in).
3. Add your logo, a border and the fixed text, such as "Certificate of completion" and your organisation's name.
4. Type a placeholder wherever the text should change, wrapped in double angle brackets: <<Name>>, <<Course>>, <<Date>>. Style each placeholder with the font and size you want for the final text.
5. Leave room for long names. A placeholder is short, but "Maria Fernanda Rodríguez Alvarado" is not.

Step 2: Prepare the participant list in Google Sheets

Put one participant per row, with a header row on top. Make the headers match your placeholders exactly (Name, Course, Date), because Autocrat maps them automatically when they match and the tags are case sensitive. Add an Email column if you want Autocrat to send the files.

Step 3: Merge with Autocrat

Autocrat is a document merge add-on for Google Sheets from New Visions Cloudlab. It takes spreadsheet data, merges it into a template through <<merge tags>> and produces one document per row. New Visions' own getting started tutorial lists Google Slides among the document types it works with.

1. Install Autocrat from the Google Workspace Marketplace and open it in your sheet.
2. Click New job and give it a name.
3. Choose your Slides file as the template.
4. Map each tag to a column. Matching headers are mapped for you.
5. Under file settings, pick PDF as the file type and set a file name with tags, for example <<Name>> certificate. Choose a Drive folder for the output.
6. Optionally, turn on email. Autocrat can send each document as an email attachment, using the address in your Email column.
7. Open the job details and run the preview for the first mergeable row. It runs the merge for one row and sends the email only to you, so you can check the result before anyone else sees it.
8. Run the job. Autocrat writes a status in the sheet for each row it has merged.

That last point matters later. Autocrat skips any row that already has a status, so running the job twice does not send duplicates.

Where this setup stops

For a school or a small internal course, Slides and Autocrat can be enough. For a training company issuing certificates every week, three gaps show up.

The certificate is a file and nothing more. There is no verification page behind it. When an employer wants to confirm that someone finished your course, they have to ask you, and you have to look it up in a spreadsheet.

Corrections are manual. If a name is misspelled, you fix the cell, delete that row's status so Autocrat merges it again, and run the job. The participant then has two PDFs and two emails, and you hope they keep the right one.

It runs on your account. Autocrat sends email as you and needs broad access to your Drive, Docs, Slides and Sheets. Some organisations are fine with that. Others will want to know who approved it and where participant data ends up.

The next step: Diplino

Diplino covers the part after the template. You add your logo and colours, upload your participant list as a CSV file (Google Sheets can download one directly), and each participant gets a personal certificate by email. Every certificate has its own verification page and QR code, so anyone can check it is genuine without contacting you. Diplino also sends an automatic reminder to participants who have not opened their certificate, and shows you which emails bounced or were not opened so you can resend them.

If you need to fix a name, you correct it and resend, and it does not use up a certificate. There is no fee per certificate. Certificates, emails and the verification page work in nine languages, data is hosted in the EU, and a DPA comes with every plan.

You can test your design with free sample certificates, as many as you like. They are watermarked and cannot be verified. The Free plan then gives you 10 real certificates, and paid plans start at 12 EUR a month billed annually.

Create a free sample certificate