Massive docx + Power Platform app
Hello everyone,
I'm helping ideate and manage a project that our organization wants to build on the Power Platform. They already have several PowerApps in production and want to keep feeding the same data lake, so there's real stack pressure to stay inside Microsoft. I'm not a Power Platform developer — I know the fundamentals, but I'm aware of how much I don't know.
What we're replacing
We have two templates that run ~120 pages each in Word. Today, users pick the right master template, copy the template and "edit by deletion" — they delete every paragraph, line, and option that doesn't apply to the project at hand.
Inside one of those templates:
- ~4,000 Word content controls
- Only ~27 unique tag values across all 4,000 controls — almost every one is tagged either
SELECTorTYPE. So they're labeled, but not uniquely. - ~119 plain-text placeholders in square brackets like
[SELECT]that aren't wrapped in content controls at all.
The master templates get revised a few times a year — wording changes, new sections, regulation updates — by subject-matter experts who are not developers.
What the org wants to build
PowerApps canvas app for the question UI → Dataverse to store the question catalog and user answers → Power Automate flow uses Populate Word Template to fill the doc → SharePoint for storage. All Entra ID auth.
Why I'm posting
Two specific concerns I can't get past on my own:
- Populate Word Template binds to content controls by tag. With ~27 unique tags across 4,000 controls, the flow can't tell most of them apart. We'd need a labeling pass on every control we want to populate. The scope of just that prep work alone scares me before we've built anything.
- The dual-source problem. Adding or editing a single question later means coordinated changes in three places: the Word template (the control itself), the Dataverse table (the question record), and the Power Automate flow (the binding between them). There's no single edit path an SME could own — every wording change loops back through a developer. Given the templates change several times a year, this feels like a long-term tax I'm walking the org into.
What I'm hoping to learn
- Has anyone shipped Populate Word Template against templates this size in production? Where does it actually break — performance, debugging, maintenance, something else?
- How do teams keep three coupled systems (Word + Dataverse + Flow) editable by non-developers without ongoing developer involvement? Or is that just not a realistic ask?
- Are there string-substitution alternatives (docxtemplater for Node, docxtpl for Python) that people have used successfully for this pattern, and how do they compare on the maintenance story? Or is staying inside Power Platform worth the constraints because of the integration upside?
Happy to provide more detail on any of this. Thanks in advance.