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mikepilgrim
New Member

Create documents from powerapps

Hello 

 

I am new to powerapps and I have a very simple question which doesn't seem to be answered anywhere 

 

My business is editing fiction books. I produce a Word doc report for my clients about their book. A lot of this is standard paragraphs which can be stored in a database and then mail merged into a document. And some has to be written / edited. I can do this with access and word but I want my employees to be able to produce their own text doc reports using the same database of paragraphs. Can I do this with powerapps? I don't know how to code. 

 

The report document is made from a bank of multiple fields and is structured the same each time. 

 

For example, let's say there's a section of the report called 'dialogue issues' - When my staff go on the app, I would like them to have a drop down selection of: 'no issues', 'minor issues' or 'lots of issues' then depending which they select the correct paragraph is inserted into the document. Or inserted into the database and then I can produce the document from the answers they've given. 

They'd also need the ability to edit the text provided from their selection. 

 

Is that possible and how difficult / easy is it? 

7 REPLIES 7
mikepilgrim
New Member

Also, my employees work remotely 

@mikepilgrimIt is possible to take metadata from PowerApps and write it to a Word Document. The document will not update if you make changes. 

 

I'm working on a process right now, but it's rather time consuming. 

@BrendonBrooksP1 

 

Thanks Brendon 

 

If it makes it easier, my employees could maybe just update the database (with fields pre-filled in depending on their selection, and they can add to / edit) and then I could produce the document myself based on the fields they provide? 

 

Are you working on it for me? Or are you just generally working on it? 

If it doesn't already exist, I'm sure there's lots of companies that would pay for such a thing. 

 

 

 

I'm just generally working on it for a few projects with PowerApps. 

 

Essentially, one of my users would fill out a form, and that data would get sent to both a SQL database and a SharePoint list. Then, the list data is populated into a Word document using Flow.  The trouble that I'm having is getting the metadata to populate to the right part of the word document. 

 

PowerApps is still a work in progress and many features that would be awesome to have, such as this one, aren't easily available or just do not exist at this time. The PA team is still working on a lot of these features. 

ok cool - have you used mail merge with excel much? It's pretty powerful - it's kind of the same thing I think, but I think you're the expert here, so apologies if I'm preaching to the priest 😉 

Please can you post here or email me when you're finished. pilgrimist@outlook.com 

 

Thank you 

Trust me, I'm far from an expert around here.  Just slightly smarter than the average bear. 

Look at mail merge from a Word doc, using excel data - It's pretty awesome. It has some issues with sometimes putting a load of decimal points from a number field but with access it's pretty much flawless. With my last business everything was run from a spreadsheet (eventually we upgraded to ms dynamics) and we produced about 1000 letters a week - all different types but all from mailmerge 

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