MS Office populating form fields across multiple documents

[RrogerD]

Is it possible to say, have a single Excel spreadsheet or Word table for example containing a list of people and their data: name, address, contact number, date etc and then have various Word documents' titles and fields within, auto-populated in Form-fields with this data? Presumably, there would be a button to press to instruct the auto-population?

Mail-merge appears to allow one document (a letter) to be created multiple times with different names in each.
However, I am wanting multiple documents created with one name used across each.
And then obviously repeated for each of the other names.

For example:

Folder name: Joe Bloggs
Docs within folder:
1 Joe Bloggs start-up instructions.doc
2. Joe Bloggs ongoing work process.doc
3. Joe Bloggs completion actions.doc
etc

Then, within the Word document it will look something like this:

Start-up Instructions
Name: _________________
Address: _______________________________________
Mobile: ______________
Date: _________

These are the instructions blah, blah, blah.

With the empty lines sections being form-fields that would be auto populated based upon the name entered in the folder name.

Thanks in advance for any help offered.

 

[Justin Passing]

Yes you can, I've done it many times, but years ago now.
It IS mail merge.
I used to be efficient and use it for xmas cards and whatnot.
What I can remember, probably won't help -
You have a DATA document which is a table of all the people, with colums for "address line one", "address line two" etc and a Form file with the template, where you use all those field names.
For an address label, the "form" is tiny.
What I can't remember(it's abit late)
is the "next Record" or somesuch phrase you put in your FOrm Letter to make it get the next row from the Data file with the table in it.

I expect you've found it by now. If not, do come back. I expect there are Youtube videos with it...

 

[RrogerD]

Yes you can, I've done it many times, but years ago now.
It IS mail merge.
I used to be efficient and use it for xmas cards and whatnot.
What I can remember, probably won't help -
You have a DATA document which is a table of all the people, with colums for "address line one", "address line two" etc and a Form file with the template, where you use all those field names.
For an address label, the "form" is tiny.
What I can't remember(it's abit late)
is the "next Record" or somesuch phrase you put in your FOrm Letter to make it get the next row from the Data file with the table in it.

I expect you've found it by now. If not, do come back. I expect there are Youtube videos with it...

Thanks for taking the time to reply, much appreciated.
Mail-merge I think, is as it suggest, you have a database of recipients and send the same, single document to all populating parts of each specific to the recipient.
My issue, I have I suppose a matrix setup. 5x different documents and 5x different recipients. Within each document, possibly 3 or so field entries. I need to take recipient 1 and populate docs 1 to 5 then, recipient 2 ditto and so on.
Thanks again for your input.

 

[IT Minion]

SharePoint list with fields that are connected to Word Quick parts in the document. You can use the SharePoint list as the spreadsheet and the data gets pushed to the document.

Or take it up a level.and use document sets to package up a group of standard templates and push the metadata down from a single point.

 

[Justin Passing]

Thanks for taking the time to reply, much appreciated.
Mail-merge I think, is as it suggest, you have a database of recipients and send the same, single document to all populating parts of each specific to the recipient.
My issue, I have I suppose a matrix setup. 5x different documents and 5x different recipients. Within each document, possibly 3 or so field entries. I need to take recipient 1 and populate docs 1 to 5 then, recipient 2 ditto and so on.
Thanks again for your input.

YOu can go either way, one to many or many to one, if that makes sense.
You only need one Data document, but separate Forms (do they call them Form Letters?).
Your source (data) document can be Excel. It gets a bit more complex.

I'll see what I can find!

 

[RrogerD]

SharePoint list with fields that are connected to Word Quick parts in the document. You can use the SharePoint list as the spreadsheet and the data gets pushed to the document.

Or take it up a level.and use document sets to package up a group of standard templates and push the metadata down from a single point.

I have absolutely no idea what you're saying lol! Just a load of words strung together. But thanks though. Maybe a few things to stick into Google for starters

 

[IT Minion]

If you have SharePoint available then it has tools to do it. But you'd need to know how to use the technology to get it done.

You could fling the random words into Chat GPT and it would probably be able to expand each step.