The popularity of e-documents has surely been boosted by offices with a go-paperless goal. But along with the use of such documents, several companies have even employed processes to automate document creation a.k.a., Document Automation.
“To err is Human” – An important reason why many companies are looking to automate processes, is to avoid any unwanted clerical errors.
For your WordPress website, if you wanted to automatically generate Word Documents for user entered data, the Word Auto-Fill solution, is just what you need.
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What is the Word Auto-Fill Solution?
The Word Auto-Fill solution automates the process of generating Word Documents, using data (entered through an online form). Instead of an exact mapping of an online form to a Word Document, this particular solution allows you to define your own document template (or an out-line) and map individual form fields to fields in the template. Thus you can custom create a Word document as per your needs.
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Word Auto-Fill: Features
As a functionality integrated into your WordPress website, the Word Auto-Fill solution provides a user the following options:
- Option to Upload Word Document Templates: The administrator has an option to upload and save the Word Document Templates, he creates. A Template is a blue print of the Word Document which will be created.
- Online form to Word Document(s) Mapping: The data to be filled in the Word Document will be read from an entry made using an online form. A Mapping Page allows the administrator to decide and map a Form to one or more Word Documents.
- Document Generation with Export Options: When user enters his/her information in the online form, the data is saved to a database. The administrator can then, go to the Document Generation Page, to export the needed docx files.
- Download and Email options: The administrator can either download and save the generated .docx file, or email the file as an attachment, if needed.
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Word Auto-Fill: Document Generation
The Word Auto-Fill functionality currently works with the Gravity Forms Plugin. You will need to install and activate the Gravity Forms plugin on your site, to use this functionality. Do note: the solution can be customized to be used with any Form Builder plugin, provided that form entries are saved in the database.
Build a Form with the Gravity Forms Plugin
The Gravity Forms plugin provides you an easy option to add fields to your form. The names of the form fields will be used to map individual values to fields in the document template. To ensure accurate mapping of field values, make sure that the field name does not contain any special characters.
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Create a DOCX Template
The next step is to create the DOCX template in MS WORD 2007 and map the appropriate form fields. You have to create a DOCX file with empty values. Then, you need to then use the form fields as the placeholders for these values.
For example, if you have created a Gravity Form with a field ‘Project_Name’, the placeholder for the corresponding field is ${Project_Name}.
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Upload the DOCX Template
The Word Auto-Fill functionality provides an option to upload ‘Word Templates’. This option is similar to adding a new file in the media library. Once you have uploaded the created DOCX template, you can move on ahead and map the template to your forms.
Map Gravity Form to DOCX Template
After having successfully uploaded the DOCX template, you need to map the Gravity Form to the template. Even though you have added the placeholders for field names, you still need to perform this upper level mapping, to generate the needed DOCX files. You can map multiple DOCX templates to a single Gravity Form.
Generate and Download the DOCX File
In your dashboard, the Word Auto-Fill functionality adds an admin option, to ‘Create DOCX File’, for every Gravity Form entry (provided of course that you have mapped the form to one or more DOCX templates). A similar link can also be provided in the frontend, if you wanted to provide users an option to download a DOCX file, upon document submission.
The generated file, can be either downloaded, or emailed, to the needed person.
After completing the steps, you will have successfully created the required Word Documents. The templates and mapping are of course saved in the database, to allow you to create documents when needed. The Word Auto-Fill solution thus serves an integral purpose in the document automation process, by eliminating the need for manual effort (thus reducing error), increasing data security and reducing cost.
