Rajeev Pentyala – Technical Blog on Power Platform, Azure and AI

Document Generation is a new feature introduced in CRM 2016. Document Generation simplifies converting your CRM data to either Word or Excel documents.

Below are the steps to

• Download Template
• Configure Template
• Upload Template
• Generate Document.

Download the Document Template

• Navigate to ‘Settings  -> Templates’
• Choose ‘Document Templates’

• Click ‘New’ button
• Choose the type of document (Excel\Word) and choose entity

• Select the Related entities, if you want to populate your Document with data from related entities too. I chosen ‘Contact’ in this example.

• Once you download the template you can open and create a template by mapping the fields from CRM.
• But what if you don’t find the ‘Developer’ tab?

Steps to enable ‘Developer’ tab

• Open the word document
• Go to File -> Options -> Customize Ribbon
• Select the ‘Developer’ option and click ‘Ok’

• Once you get ‘Developer’ tab on Word document, choose ‘XML Mapping’ pane and choose “urn:microsoft-crm/…../{entity_name}/1/”

Configure Document Template

• In this example, I am going to configure a Document Template with Account details along with all associated Contacts.
• To add Account Name choose ‘Name’ from ‘XML Mapping’ pane and right click and choose ‘Plain Text’.

• If you have to display multiple rows (i.e., Contacts of an Account record) add a table and map fields from ‘Contact’.

Upload Document Template

• Once you are done with content preparation, save the document and upload back to CRM using ‘UPLOAD TEMPLATE’.

• I name my Document Template with ‘Account_Venilla’.

• We are done with configuring ‘Document Template’. Next step is generate the document from the Entity.
• We can also upload ‘Document Template’ through SDK using ‘DocumentTemplate‘ class.

Document Generation

• Open Account record
• Select ‘Word Templates -> {Document_Template_Name}’

• Download the document and open.
• You would see some thing as below

🙂