Populating a Word document with Microsoft Power Automate

Dynamics 365 has long had the ability to populate Word templates, but not without limitations. Now with Power Automate, there is an easier way.

Microsoft Power Automate has a huge range of functionality and with the help of the native Word connector, it is possible to take a prepared Word document and populate it with data from Microsoft Dynamics 365. The main advantage of this method over using traditional Dynamics 365 templates is that the data can come from any tables that you reference in your flow and can also be combined with additional data along the way.

This tip has steps that are required to create your customized Word document and create a multi-page report using Dynamics 365 data.

A one-time step that needs to be carried out is to enable the Developer tab in Word’s ribbon.

1.   Go to the File Tab and select Options/Custom Ribbon, choose the Developer Option and Click OK.  Your window should look as shown:

Next start a new Word document and format as required. In this example, we’re creating a simple table of contact information:

First Name	Last Name	Email Address	Address	City	State

 For this tip we will have repeating rows to populate the table within the document, so you only need to create one blank row for now

For each field you want to populate, you will need to add a placeholder reference via the Developer tab as shown in the following figure.

1 – Developer tab

2 – References

3 – Design Mode

1.     Click the Insert Text Control button

2.     Enter a name of your choosing in the ‘Title’ box and click OK. Keep this simple – lower case with no spaces.

3.   When  all the fields are in place and with their titles set, you will need to select the entire row and add a Repeating Section Content Control, as seen below:

Now that the Word document is ready, you need to upload it so that it can be accessed by Power Automate. The simplest place for this would be OneDrive for Business, but SharePoint is another straightforward option as well.

You are now ready to create the flow to populate your template with data from Dynamics 365. Head over to Power Automate begin creating your flow, either from the Flows option in the menu or creating the Flow.  In this tip, you have kept things simple, with the flow being triggered manually and listing all contacts:

The key part to note is the initialization of an empty array that we will later be populating with Dynamics data.

Next, add an Append To Array Variable action, select your array variable initialized earlier and enter your text as shown:

You will note that as soon as you add the first field (First Name in our example), an Apply To Each loop is automatically created for you; this enables your Flow to automatically loop through all of the records found in your List Records action. Ensure that ‘Value’ text is entered cautiously in the same format as above or you will get an error message.

Now that you have prepared your data, you are now ready to populate your uploaded Word Document. When you add a Populate a Microsoft Word Template action, you will be prompted to browse for the location of the file and once selected, the references you added earlier will automatically be displayed:

Although each individual reference is displayed, by clicking the Switch To Input Entire Array button, you can populate the entire row at once using your array variable:

With the Word document now containing data, it’s ready to be used; in this case, you are just sending a simple email with the Word file as an attachment:

And as you can see, the received document is now populated with all the requested Contact data:

  

First Name	Last Name	Email Address	Address	City	State
Carol	Ray-Holmes	Carol.rayholmes@ladyraycomputer.net	1234 Anywhere St	Sacramento	CA
Joe	Jones	Joe.jones@sampleemail.com	3949 Freed Street	Cleveland	OH
Jean	Stinnett	Jean.stinnett@sampleemail.com	4848 St John Road	Atlanta	GA
Remme	Smith	Remme.smith@sampleemail.com	2920 Steward Rd	Houston	TX

Now with a  few simple steps, Word documents can be created that can be populated with your Dynamics 365 data. Once a Word file has been created, edits to this file can easily be made and the original file overwritten, making it much easier to maintain than a traditional Dynamics 365 template.

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