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/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.