Crafting the right document template for your workflow is a pivotal decision—and it doesn’t have to be daunting. Whether you're starting from scratch, refining an existing draft, or leveraging Formstack’s smart features, choosing the right approach can save you time, reduce errors, and help you deliver professional‑grade documents consistently. In this guide, we'll walk through three distinct template‑creation strategies
Overview
One of the strengths of Formstack Documents is the flexibility it gives you to work with various template formats:
- Formstack Documents Native Drag & Drop Builder
- Using a Fillable PDF as a Template
- Using a Word Document as a Template (as well as other Microsoft formats, including Excel and PowerPoint)
Help plan for the right template format for your Formstack Documents Implementation by reviewing each approach's strengths and important considerations as listed below.
Note: For a Formstack Documents for Salesforce implementation, a key point as you consider these techniques is the paradigm for a Formstack Documents implementation is you start with your document templates and deliveries and then define the data that is mapped into the templates.
Formstack Documents Builder
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Strengths
- You can see your Merge Fields in a pill format and drag them onto your template canvas. For this reason, it’s a great choice when you are building a document that is being populated based on a Formstack form, as it will be fast and easy for you to work with the fields from your form.
- Easy to add commonly used modifiers (abbreviate, capitalize, date formatting, currency) to your Merge Fields.
- Works well with Salesforce-rich text fields.
- Works great when accessed within Salesforce as part of Formstack Documents for Salesforce Managed Package.
- Build times for document merges. Creating templates in our Documents Builders is the recommended approach if you are designing a document generation process where there is an end-user expectation of rapid generation of the document (e.g. returning a document back to the user via an interface at the time of merge).
- The ability to modify HTML source code gives you a lot of flexibility.
- You can make live edits via the builder interface (as opposed to downloading/uploading files like you’ll have to do with Word or PDF).
- E-Signature tags are easy to use. It works great along with Formstack Sign or other digital signature products.
- Easy to insert syntax e.g. Merge Field, If/Else statements, Loops, E-Signature tags.
- A great way to build dynamic tables (e.g. tables that have a dynamic number of rows based on data)
- When using the Advanced HTML Editor, a "Text / Advanced" file output option becomes available (in the Settings tab) that lets you specify a custom file output type.
- Can be used in conjunction with the AI template creation feature.
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Important Considerations
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Does not support the Table of Contents.
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To use the Drag and Drop features, it is best to log in outside of Salesforce (via Formstack.com login) as the Drag and Drop does not work well when iFramed inside of Salesforce.
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Note that even if you have set up your mappings, you will still need to create your Merge Fields within the Builder to use Drag and Drop.
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For our native document builder we can output to: pdf, docx, xlsx, html, xml, email, jpg, text/advanced (which lets you specify the extension).
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Fillable PDF Templates
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Strengths
- The design format is set in a Fillable PDF, which makes it a strong option when you are working with documents that have extremely specific/precise design or layout formats.
- Fillable PDF advantages over Word, including checkbox formatting. In the properties of the checkbox, you’ll be able to set the value of the checkbox and map picklist values to the checkbox, which makes it more flexible to work with. This is also the case for radio buttons.
- Fillable PDF templates will have faster merge times than .DOCX templates because can bypass the .DOCX file conversion step.
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Important Considerations
- If you are working with a Fillable PDF provided by a third party (e.g. government document) that you are not able to edit, you will be very limited on how you customize that document. If you do run into this, a possible workaround is to export the file to *.eps and then save it back to PDF in order to have expanded editing capabilities.
- A non-editable PDF will also mean you will have challenges if you need to manipulate data coming in from a data source. For example, you will run into challenges if you have an editable PDF, and you are wanting to bring a value in from a data source = true, and have a checkbox appear checked.
- If you have use cases requiring looping, this will be more complex with a fillable PDF (requires more complex syntax in an array than looping that can be used with other formats).
- Dynamic looping is very difficult. Any use cases that require a variable number of rows in a table will be challenging to set up with a PDF template.
- For those also incorporating digital signature, you will not be able to make the text transparent, which means E-Signature tags would show if placed over a gradient color.
- Limited space for E-Signature tags means you should only use Fillable PDF with digital signatures if you are only collecting signatures without extra data captured at the time of signature.
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For fillable PDFs we can output to: pdf (flattened or unflattened) and jpg.
Word Document Templates
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Strengths
- A strength over PDF is you will be able to set up dynamic tables.
- Support Table of Contents.
- Sizing & placement of images is easier.
- Precise control of borders.
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Important Considerations
- Merge syntax is the responsibility of the user setting up the document. You don’t have the ability to insert syntax like in the Document Builders, or property fields like you do in PDF.
- Parts of rich text from Salesforce will not translate into Word.
- Requires individual Word subscriptions for any users administering templates.
- Copy and pasting can sometimes incorporate unintended tags/encoding data and may require troubleshooting (especially quotation marks and formatting) in order to work correctly.
- Word Documents may be edited; Word’s security settings aren't supported by Formstack. For sensitive documents, the best use cases include using a PDF or using a data route to call in a fixed remote file.
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For docx we can output to: docx, pdf and jpg. For xlsx we can output to: xlsx and pdf. For pptx we can output to: pptx, ppsx, pdf and jpg.
Have any further questions? We’re here to help! Please reach out to support@formstack.com for additional assistance with your use case.