I’m a beginner to Powershell and CLI in general, but this task does not need to use either so I’m open to using other tools.
I’m trying to do the following:
- Create multiple files from a Word template.
- Rename each file based on a list of names found in an Excel/CSV sheet.
Thanks in advance!
You should be able to use COM interoperability , specifically the OpenAsDocument() and Save() methods. You can also use COM interoperability to read from Excel, but using ImprtFrom-CSV would be much easier. Then you just iterate over the file names, and for each one open the template as a document, then save it as the filename.
Sorry I’m new to this. What exactly do I enter into Powershell for each step?
Nevermind I got it!
Does it have to be a Word template? If you can get that into a plain text format this will be much easier. There may be a module that you can download online otherwise you are probably going to have to do some painful parsing after you import the file using “Get-Content”.
Do you have any code written? This sounds like something that ChatGPT could probably handle pretty well.
It does have to be a Word template. It has a bar graph and various texts.
Yeah, I looked at the plain text of a .dotx file. That’s unparsable. The other poster probably has the right idea on how to get information out of the file.
For csv import, use import-csv and loop on the results:
Import-csv myfile.csv | foreach-object {Templates should be easy, just copy the template to a new file with the docx extension. Use one of the columns (in this case “name” as the column header,) from the csv for the name:
$newname = $_.name + '.docx' Copy-item 'template.dotx' $newname }Hey this worked for me yesterday but now I’m having trouble getting it to work again. It just outputs a Word doc titled ‘.docx’ now.
Make sure the columns in your csv are named properly, my code assumes it’s named just “name”
By the way, what would be the equivalent code when using a text file for the list of names rather than a csv file?
Ah, I think that was it. Forgot about the column heading. Thanks for your help!
So I’m new to all this. When I enter the first command with my csv file and doc file included, it just opens the word doc. Wasn’t sure what I should do next.
Actually nevermind that question. Just realized the command was split.
I’m assuming I need to replace the name portion of the 2nd line. What do I input if the data is a list that starts in A1?
I got it now!
Sounds like you’re just copying a template to new files based on a csv? You don’t have to edit anything inside the word files at all?
If that’s the case, just load the csv file, I think the command is Read-Content, loop through each line, split by ‘,’ parse whatever name data you need and copy your template.docx to your new file.docx
If the Excel/CSV sheet is actually a CSV file,
Import-Csvin powershell will return the content as an array of objects, where each row is one element in the array.
