Inserting names in specific location over image, batch

Question

I am an ESL teacher and one of the things I do is give kids paper to practice writing their names in English to get them familiar with writing Roman letters. I am familiar with the Adobe suite and MSWord, Excel baffles me when going past making charts.

There is this website that does exactly what I want (though a bit more than I need tbh) but it is tedious. There is no way to insert more than one name at a time. I need to do 200+ names and that is just this year.

I have two ideas, but I think there has to be an easier way.

Method one: Use mail merge in MS word though I am unsure how I will get the text to center over the image of writing paper (think kindergarten) properly in MSWord.

Method two: Make a 200 page IDD that has the kindergarten paper as the background image, paste the name list (triplicated thanks to Excel and stripped of any Excel formatting thanks to Notepad) into the document then loads of paragraph formatting and pressing enter until it's done.

Any ideas? Ideally I could either comma separate names or import the Excel sheet with the names and it would just churn out one PDF with one kid per page. Or, one document per kid. Don't care. Just, trying to reduce the amount of work going into this. Plus, other teachers in the same situation will appreciate this!

Answer 1

Simply use method 1, Mail merge.

You can center the text simply by formating it.

Center the text using center text alignment.

You can repeat as many times you need the same name over and over.

Here is a screen capture using a verey old version of word. But it is exactly the same case. Format and repeat.

You can add a background image and play with the font size and space after paragraphs to align the text with the lines.