Enable DocuGen to insert values into placeholders in MS Word formulas

Ideas & feature requests
1

I’m using DocuGen with monday.com to generate reports. These reports contain text that is dependent on the values of a number of columns in the main table. For example, if our client record indicates that they don’t have an electric vehicle, we include text in the report describing EV’s, their benefits, and their costs. If our client record indicates that they don’t have solar panes, we include text in the report describing solar panels, their benefits, and their costs. Note that we have a lot of columns like this in our main table.

The solution I’ve been offered is to create formula columns in our main table. So we would have col1 contain the text we want if the EV column contains “no”. We would have col2 contain the text we want if the Solar Panels column contains “no”. And so on. Note that this means we would have a lot of formula columns.

I would be happy to use this solution, if, as a non-profit organization, we could pay for monday.com (rather than being on their free plan) and be able to hide columns from our users. But we’re not, so our users would see all of these formula columns when they open kanban cards for our clients.

My attempt at solving this was to use MS Word formulas rather than monday com formula columns. I would create formulas stating something like {IF <<column_firstrow:EV>> eq “No”, “info about EV’s goes here”, “”}.

I tried doing this, but when I tried to preview the report, all I got was the spinner. I’m assuming it doesn’t work?

If this is not possible, this is an enhancement I would like to see.

2

Hi Bill,
thank you for this elaborate explanation. :slight_smile:

Yes, that workaround with formula columns is what would normally work, but I understand that monday.com may not be something you can afford as a non-profit.

Another (more cumbersome) way of doing this would be to have a template for every possible scenario. For example, you could have one template where the EV column is “no” and another one where there’s a description of EV. However, since you mention you’d have a lot of these options, it means you’d need to have one template for each combination.

I’d say if the number is up to 10-12 different scenarios, that could be somewhat managable. Otherwise, it will become too complex.

Using formulas in the MS template like you’ve tried will not work unfortunately. But if you ever needed to upgrade your DocuGen plan please reach out to our Support team and we’ll be more than happy to give you a substantial discount.