Populating MS Word Templates with Python
Posted by Chris Moffitt in articles
In a previous post, I covered one approach for generating documents using HTML templates to create a PDF. While PDF is great, the world still relies on Microsoft Word for document creation. In reality, it will be much simpler for a business user to create the desired template that supports all the custom formatting they need in Word versus trying to use HTML+CSS. Fortunately, there is a a package that supports doing a MS Word mailmerge purely within python. This approach has the advantage of running on any system - even if Word is not installed. The benefit to using python for the merge (vs. an Excel sheet) is that you are not limited in how you retrieve or process the data. The full flexibility and power of the python ecosystem is at your finger tips. This should be a useful tool to keep in mind any time you need to automate document creation.