Document Generation

Mail merge from Word and Excel is fine for a letter run. It breaks down when documents depend on live data, need approval before they go out, or have to be filed where someone can find them a year later: contracts built from a CRM record, monthly statements for every account, certificates issued when a course is completed.

We build document generation into the application or into a background service. The service pulls the record, fills a template, produces Word, Excel or PDF output, stores the file with searchable metadata such as customer, document type, date and template version, and logs who generated or sent it. Word and Excel files can be written directly with the Open XML SDK, which works with Office Open XML documents without running Office. It does not render PDF, so PDF output needs a separately chosen PDF generation or conversion component. Microsoft does not recommend or support automating Office applications from unattended server code such as ASP.NET or Windows services, because Office can become unstable or deadlock there. When an existing system drives Word on a web server to produce documents, we recommend moving that step to direct file generation before adding new document features.

Generated documents can feed a review and approval workflow.