Programming @programming.dev BobTheDestroyer @lemy.lol 4mo ago

Powershell: Create multiple files from a Word template and rename using a list in Excel/CSV

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!

17 comments

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 }
- 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?
- 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"
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
A good / better option for this is AutoIt. It can interact directly with MS Office via internal APIs and it also has a function to read CSVs.
If the Excel/CSV sheet is actually a CSV file, Import-Csv in powershell will return the content as an array of objects, where each row is one element in the array.

17 comments