How to edit a spreadsheet with Coldfusion?

Excel - can it be used to edit saved word documents?

• is there any way that you can create an excel spreadsheet that will take some text you type in and use it to edit an existing word document? for example a spreadsheet that would read something like: name: address: etc: Now if you were to give excel the information such as the name address and etc could it then use that to edit an existing word template and maintain decent formatting? to get a better understanding of what i need this for, i need to create many letters without having to type in information on each individual letter, I'd rather try to create some excel program or macro or something to make this a much easier process. is this possible?

• Answer:

  Yeah, that can easily be done. For what you're wanting to do, I don't think you even need macros. Look up mail merge in Excel's help or Word's help. Basically you create a Word form with different named fields. Then you create an Excel workbook with those fields in different columns. Each row is like 1 person or document. Then mail merge will go through Excel document and create all of those Word documents with the appropriate field in the appropriate place in your word document. If you need something more complicated than that like the text to change based upon one thing or another or it to put tables in, etc then you'll need macros. I've worked on several projects that do that.