Hi @Qiu
We actually can create design Word Doc with Alteryx, it requires some preparation steps however it is possible. I already created workflows that generating reports on Word doc and without the use of Render as it will not be the solution here.
@JohnGagnon2000
Ok that will be a big long description, this is a solution that I managed to figure out at the beginning of this year and it will work only with docx format files. All the PPTX, DOCX, XLSX etc formats are actually an XML files. I guess now you start to think what is my solution :)
So it is super important to replace the text that you will want to replace to a very unique text so you can easily be able to replace it in Alteryx, For simple text as Name, Date etc you can use what you want I normally would do something as Bi19ll, 01/88/9999 depends on the date format. For paragraphs or sections in paragraphs I would just use dfds878gh etc. just long string without any spaces or comas, 10-20 characters.
Now that you template is ready, save it in a separate folder just for this project.
Unzip the Word file and you will get several folders and files. Move all of them into a sub folder, why, because what Alteryx will do it will update these files and then you will need to zip them back into Word Doc file, so you want to have all the files in one separate folder, you will use Ran Command to zip these files.
Now go back to the original folder and create on sub folder for the XML template files, why are you want to have the original template unchanged, this will let you later own to recreate as many Word Doc as you wish.
All my above instructions are based on my personal experience and where I lost time, so if you follow the above then you will be good.
In Word folder, one the folders that you exported the data. You will find all the XML files. You will have files for the headers footers etc. Copy all these XMLs files and paste them into the Template folder.
Template folder will be the input source for Alteryx. The Word folder will be your target output location.
So what you will need to do in Alteryx will be, connect the templates that you want to replace the data to Alteryx. I import it as csv file as I would like to have the full XML format in Alteryx, then I will use RecordID to ENSURE that I do not messing up the xml schema.
You will need now to input the new data, create mapping based on RecordID, replace the unique text that you have in the template with the new text.
Put all the XML together back to the original order, only with the new values. Remove the RecordID and save it to the target location with the original name such as, document.xml
After that you saved all the XML files, you then need to zip everything that in that subfolder, with Run Command and then with another Run Command you will need to rename the file to whatever naming you want, but it must be xlsx format.
Good luck!
The above is working perfectly for me and we are generating formatted reports, contracts, etc.
