How to populate a Word template from Excel

You already have the document — the contract, the certificate, the offer letter. Only a handful of words change each time, and those words are sitting in a spreadsheet. This is how to get them from one file into the other, forty times over, without retyping.

Step 1: Mark what changes

Open the document you already use and find every piece of text that differs from one copy to the next: the customer, the amount, the date, the reference number. Everything else — layout, logo, letterhead, terms — stays exactly as it is.

There are three ways to mark those spots, and which one you use decides which fillers will work:

Plain placeholders are the least clever and the most portable. They are ordinary text, so they survive being emailed, copied into a new document, or opened in Google Docs and LibreOffice. Type them so they match your spreadsheet's column names and nothing has to be mapped by hand.

One thing worth knowing: put placeholders in headers and footers too if the reference number lives there. Several filling methods skip headers, and that is where document numbers usually hide.

Step 2: Get the spreadsheet right

• Row 1 is column names. Every name filled in, no duplicates.
• One row per document. No blank rows in the middle — some methods stop at the first one.
• No merged cells anywhere in the data block.
• Put dates and amounts in the form you want printed. A cell showing 1,250.00 holds the number 1250; a cell showing a date holds a serial number. Several methods send the value, not the display. Why that happens, and the fixes.
• Add a column that uniquely identifies each row. You will want it for filenames.

Step 3: Pick a filler

Word's mail merge

Free and built in. Mailings → Select Recipients → Use an Existing List, point at the workbook, insert merge fields, Finish & Merge. It fills the template correctly.

What it does not do is give you separate files — every record lands in one long document, and there is no filename step at all. Getting one file per record is a separate problem.

Autofill it with a macro

From Excel, VBA can open the template, replace each placeholder and save the result under a name taken from a column. Loop it and the whole job is done unattended:

Set doc = wd.Documents.Open(templatePath)
doc.Content.Find.Execute FindText:="{{Customer}}", _
    ReplaceWith:=Cells(r, 2).Value, Replace:=wdReplaceAll
doc.SaveAs2 outFolder & Cells(r, 1).Value & ".docx"

Right answer if you run this every month and macros are permitted. Two catches: a plain find-and-replace does not reach headers, footers or text boxes (each needs its own pass), and on a managed work laptop macros are often disabled by policy.

Power Automate

The Microsoft 365 route, and the only one that runs on a schedule with nobody present. It uses content controls rather than typed placeholders, reads rows from a table, fills the template, converts to PDF and files the result. The conversion connectors are premium on most plans and the first flow takes an afternoon.

Import both files into a web page

Docs from Excel is built for exactly this shape of job. Upload the template with {{placeholders}} and the spreadsheet — or just the spreadsheet and one line saying what the documents are — and every row comes back as its own Word file or PDF, named from a column you pick.

• Placeholders are matched to columns by name automatically; you can correct any of them from a dropdown.
• Headers and footers are filled too, because the template is filled in place rather than taken apart.
• Values arrive as your spreadsheet displays them — 1,250.00 stays 1,250.00, dates stay dates.
• Works on .docx, .pptx and .xlsx templates. PowerPoint has no mail merge at all, so this is the only route for certificates designed in slides.

Which to choose