Word Document Templates - Document Generation

Introduction

Every organization regularly creates business documents such as proposals, invoices, non-disclosure agreements etc. No one likes to re-invent the wheel while creating these documents. Instead, use templates—standardized files conforming to branding guidelines with well formatted pre-written text and blanks for filling dynamic data. Editing a template takes far less time than formatting something from scratch, and you'll have the new document completed in a fraction of the time.

Templates also guarantee consistency. Perhaps you send regular project updates to clients or investors. With a template, you know the update will always have the same formatting, design, and general structure. The quality of word document templates tells a story about the organization – quality consciousness, brand, customer centricity etc. Hence, professional looking templates are a must to have.

However, creating templates is a daunting task. Many SMEs don’t have resources to hire UX developers for changing every document template in the organization. Moreover, templates undergo changes time-to-time.

Microsoft Word templates are the most commonly used. The good news is there are a lot of free word document templates available and you can use them in your business with little/no modifications. Most of these templates are professionally designed—so when you don’t have the time & resources to create a great looking document template, they’re a good option.

Excellent word document templates for free

Office templates : How can we not mention our very own office.com. You can search and download thousands of templates from Microsoft’s online repository.

Google and OpenOffice also offer great templates. Having a good template is only a small first step. Real work is in filling the template to create documents.

Documents creation from Template

Manual document creation by filling templates is slow, expensive, and error-prone. Using EDocGen, you can automate document generation. EDocGen supports data filling from a variety of data-sources including

• XML/Excel/ JSON data to create bulk documents
• Zapier and API integration to generate documents on-demand and bulk
• Simply use a fillable form to improve the document filling speeds > 80%

Using EDocGen, you can populate text, tables, images, content blocks etc. in word document templates. You just need to add the relevant tags to the template.

Text : Surround your dynamic text field with { }

e.g. {name}
{phone-number}
{cell_number}

Table: Add {#tableID} at the beginning of the table and {/tableID} at the end of the table as depicted below. Surround the column names with { }.

Column 1	Column 2	Column 3
{#table id=”tablemarker”} {Column1 tag}	{Column2 tag}	{Column3 tag} {/table id=”tablemarker”}

e.g.

Name	Age	Address
{#details} {name}	{age}	{address} {/details}

Image: Add image dynamic tags in the template, where you want the image to appear.

{%image id=”imagemarker” width=”454” height=”670”}

{%image} is image tag identifier in EDocGen. Imagemarker is the id of the image. Next, you have to specify the height and width of the image. The size of the image that you are going to populate must have same height and width. This is because of the inherent design of Microsoft Word.

Paragraph/Text Area:

{#textareaid}{usapara type=”paragraph”}{/textareaid}

Reusable Content Block:

{contentblockid type=”paragraph”}. Note type=”paragraph”. This helps EDocGen to identify this as content block

Once you add the tags, upload the word document template to EDocGen and populate with data-sources for on-demand/bulk document generation.