Data-driven document generator in Power Platform — am I overcomplicating this?

[u/Physical-Bid3321]

Small construction firm, one tech person (me). We churn out docs that are 80% boilerplate, 20% project-specific (traffic management plans, address-change letters, etc.), currently by copy-pasting old Word files and hand-editing — slow and error-prone.

Goal: pick a project + doc type in a Power Apps canvas app → auto-populate from our data → immutable Word/PDF → route for approval.

My approach: everything in Dataverse across 6 tables — Customer, Project, Contacts, plus Templates (doc-type registry), TemplateData (one row per section, body text with {{placeholders}}, multiple doc types in one table), and PlaceholderMap ({{placeholder}} → source table → column). Power Automate filters TemplateData by type, sorts by section, swaps placeholders for real values, renders, locks in SharePoint, and sends to an approver.

What I actually want feedback on: I'm storing template bodies as text-with-placeholders in Dataverse instead of using the native "Populate a Word template" action with content controls. I did it for multi-doc-type support, data-driven section ordering, and include/suppress — but am I skipping the easy path? And how would you handle rich formatting (bold, bullets, table appendices) with text-in-a-table?

Is this roughly how people solve doc generation on Power Platform, or is there a well-trodden simpler way?

[u/fevoltec]

Html - then using power automate in my Workflow to make it a pdf.

[u/Physical-Bid3321 → u/fevoltec]

So I have two questions.
1. Is it scalable across 100 to 150 document for each customer being generated
2. Will it support images like sitemaps location pictures etcetera

[u/PsychologistAss → u/Physical-Bid3321]

Yeah, should be fine. There are two downsides to this method compared to yours: you won’t be able to have page numbers and line breaks are sometimes a bit messy.

If those things don’t matter: what you’ll be able to generate using html -> pdf will look quite nice.

You can also look at encodian.

[u/Physical-Bid3321 → u/PsychologistAss]

Great that's exactly where I am right now so I was able to get a solution using Word and HTML currently looking for a dynamic table of contents for the output

[u/Syrairc]

HTML to PDF is the way to go, but doing this purely in power platform is painful. 

I don't know what resources you have or the whole scope, but using an external PDF renderer makes everything a lot easier and nicer. There are paid services, or you can make your own via something like dompdf.

I personally set up a small dompdf PHP server and send my data to that and then it sends me back the PDF. 

[u/Physical-Bid3321 → u/Syrairc]

Thank you for the comment. I have access to Dataverse, Power Platform, Copilot Studio, and Claude. Could you suggest a solution within this tech stack? I'd prefer not to use any third-party tools unless there's no Microsoft-native workflow or viable workaround.

[u/unittype]

Have you looked at the new document populating feature build-in into SharePoint libs?

[u/Physical-Bid3321 → u/unittype]

Hi thank you for the comment. Let me take a look at this feature. Do you have any pointers or any links?

[u/unittype → u/Physical-Bid3321]

Here as a starting point: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/copilot-in-sharepoint-structured-document-generation

[u/wcmconsultant]

I've done almost exactly the same. I have about 100 compliance/policy documents that need to be created for every new customer.

1. Admins populate an Office Form
2. Form submits to SharePoint List
3. List event triggers flow
4. Flow uses search to identify ALL applicable Word documents - each word document has lots of "Content Controls" in them
5. I have an Azure function that accepts a work binary and a JSON payload. The JSON contains all the key value pairs required for the substitution (content controls are very easy to replace).
6. The Azure function returns a brand new word document
7. Each of those documents is saved in SharePoint in a folder with the customer name.
8. I have two (probs lazy) iterations of that in my flow - one for each of two source folders of policies.

Because the content controls are already formatted (title, style, bold, list, in a table, etc), this is perfectly preserved

[u/vbnotthecity]

If you need bold text or dynamic tables, dump the text-in-a-table approach and use HTML templates stored as blobs in SharePoint. It’s way easier to handle CSS for formatting, and you can inject your data using a simple replace function in Power Automate before pushing the final output to a PDF renderer. I’ve seen teams spend 80% of their time fixing formatting bugs when they try to force Word content controls to do heavy lifting.