Create/Edit MS Word & Word Perfect docs in Django?

Question

Is it possible to create and/or edit MS Word and Word Perfect documents with django? I'd like to be able to allow the user to fill out a form and have the form fields inserted into an MS Word/Word Perfect document. Or, the form fields are used to create a new MS Word/Word Perfect document. The user can then send that document via email to others who may not have access to the django web-app.

I have a client who needs this functionality and I'd like to keep it all within the web-app.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Answer 1

For MS Word, you could use docx-mailmerge. Run the following commands to install lxml(dependecy required by docx-mailmerge) and docx-mailmerge

conda install lxml
pip install docx-mailmerge

In order for docx-mailmerge to work correctly, you need to create a standard Word document and define the appropriate merge fields. The examples below are for Word 2010. Other versions of Word should be similar. It actually took me a while to figure out this process but once you do it a couple of times, it is pretty simple.

Start Word and create the basic document structure. Then place the cursor in the location where the merged data should be inserted and choose Insert -> Quick Parts -> Field..: Word Quick Parts

From the Field dialog box, select the “MergeField” option from the Field Names list. In the Field Name, enter the name you want for the field. In this case, we are using Business Name. Word Add Field

Once you click ok, you should see something like this: <> in the Word document. You can go ahead and create the document with all the needed fields.

    from __future__ import print_function
    from mailmerge import MailMerge
    from datetime import date

    template = "Practical-Business-Python.docx"
    document = MailMerge(template)

    document.merge(
    status='Gold',
    city='Springfield',
    phone_number='800-555-5555',
    Business='Cool Shoes',
    zip='55555',
    purchases='$500,000',
    shipping_limit='$500',
    state='MO',
    address='1234 Main Street',
    date='{:%d-%b-%Y}'.format(date.today()),
    discount='5%',
    recipient='Mr. Jones')

    document.write('test-output.docx')

More at http://pbpython.com/python-word-template.html

Answer 2

I do not know how to do exactly what you ask for, but I would suggest that you also look into creating PDFs with Django. If you only want to send information in a particular format then PFD might be better because it is more portable across platforms. You may also want to look at this documentation for how to send emails from Django.