@WonderLaura – Laura Rogers

Have you ever needed end users to fill out a form and have it instantly populate a professional Word document or PDF? If so, SharePoint structured documents is a brand new feature that does exactly that — and it’s a total game changer! 🎉

In this post and video, I’ll walk you through exactly how to set up SharePoint structured documents, including the very cool conditional sections feature. I’ll also show you how to create a flow that emails the generated document to the person who filled out the form!

🎬 What Are SharePoint Structured Documents?

SharePoint structured documents is a new feature that lets you create a Word template, connect it to a form, and instantly generate a filled-out Word document or PDF every time someone submits that form. In other words, no code or tedious field mapping required!

In the past, we’ve had similar capabilities in SharePoint. For instance, Quick Parts came out back in 2010, here’s an old blog post where I showed how to Populate document templates with Power Automate & Quick Parts. Also, there is a way you can populate a Word template through a Power Automate flow action, and here’s my post about Populating Word Templates in SharePoint with Power Automate. However, both of those approaches are pretty time-consuming to set up. As a result, SharePoint structured documents is a welcome change because it makes the whole process easy and fast.

Here’s how it works at a high level:

1. First, you create a Word template with placeholder text where your fields should go.
2. Next, you go to a document library and use the new Document generation form option.
3. Then, AI (Copilot) detects the fields in your template automatically.
4. Finally, end users fill out the form, and a completed Word document or PDF (or word doc) is instantly generated in the library.

📋 Licensing Requirements for SharePoint Structured Documents

Before we jump into the steps, let’s talk licensing. The person creating the SharePoint structured documents template needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. All the end users who fill out the form do not need a Copilot license. They just need to be internal users in your organization. Bonus, they don’t even need access to the SharePoint site where the document library lives — you just share the form link with them!

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📝 Step 1 – Create Your Word Template

The first thing you need is a Word document that will serve as your template. Basically, this is just a regular Word document — nothing fancy.

1. First, open Word and create a new document with whatever layout and branding you want for your final output.
2. Wherever you want a field to appear (like client name, event date, venue, etc.), it helps to type placeholder text, since AI will be analyzing the document to recognize fields.
3. To help Copilot identify the fields more easily, I recommend putting brackets around each placeholder — for example, something like [Client Name] or [Event Date].
4. Finally, save your Word document.

That’s it! In other words, no Quick Parts, no content controls, no special formatting. Just plain text with brackets where your fields go. This is the first page of my template, you can see I inserted fields in many places, and even re-used some field names. The example is an event confirmation form.

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📂 Step 2 – Upload the Template and Create the Form

Now let’s go set up SharePoint structured documents in a document library.

1. First, go to any document library in SharePoint.

2. Then, upload your Word template to the library if it’s not already there, just using the regular “create or upload” button.

3. Next, click the Forms button in the command bar at the top of the library.

4. After that, select Document generation form.

5. Select your uploaded Word template as the base document, then click Create a form.

Once you’ve done that, the analysis has started. Copilot looks at your template and detect all the fields it finds. You’ll see a list of fields like event date, client name, event name, and so on. It does a great job of recognizing what they are!

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⚙️ Step 3 – Configure Your Fields

After Copilot detects the fields, you can fine-tune them before publishing.

1. First, review the list of detected fields. On this screen, you can only change field names. More field editing will be on a different screen. Click Continue.

SharePoint structured documents will then ask you to create a folder where the generated files will be stored. Simply give the folder a name and pick a color. Click Create.

2. Then, click on any field to change its type. For example, you might change “Event Type” from a single line of text to a Choice field, and then type in your choice values (like Corporate, Wedding, Outdoor).

3. You can even set a field to be a Lookup — and here’s the cool part — the lookup isn’t restricted to the current site. Instead, you can point to a list on a different SharePoint site!! here, I changed “Venue” to a lookup, and notice the “Select site” drop-down!

4. Also, mark fields as Required by clicking on each one and toggling the required setting.

During this process, Optionally, add a logo and description for your form.

💡 Tip: If you don’t love folders, remember that you can always create a SharePoint view that shows items without folders. Here’s my TikTok video about how to create a no folders view in SharePoint.

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📄 Step 4 – Edit the Template in Word

This is where it gets really exciting! SharePoint structured documents gives you a brand new editing interface right inside Word that connects directly to your SharePoint fields.

1. First, go back to Forms in your document library and click on your form name, or if you’re already on the form editing interface from the previous step, click Open template in Word at the top right.

You’ll see a panel on the right, for setting up the template. You have two main buttons to click:

• Set up fields – takes you to a list of fields to manage.
• Define conditional sections – takes you to a panel to add / manage any sections of the document that you’d like to only show conditionally.

Click Set up fields.

You’ll see a panel on the right side of Word with all your fields listed.

From this panel, you can:

Edit field details — for instance, change field types, add choices, or set fields as required.

Add new fields — just like creating a column in SharePoint, you can add fields right from within Word.

Insert fields into the document — simply place your cursor where you want a field, select it in the panel, and click Insert.

Manage insertions — in other words, see everywhere a field appears in the document and toggle between them.

Detect potential fields — if you’ve typed new placeholder text in the document, click this button and Copilot will automatically find and create those fields for you.

Most importantly, any fields you add from within Word will automatically appear on the form that end users fill out!

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🔀 Step 5 – Set Up Conditional Sections in SharePoint Structured Documents

OK, this is the feature that absolutely blew my mind. 🤯 Specifically, SharePoint structured documents supports conditional sections — meaning certain parts of your document will only appear based on what the user selects in the form.

For example, think about this for legal contracts, proposals, statements of work, event confirmations, or any document that needs different verbiage depending on the situation. This is HUGE.

Here’s how to create a conditional section:

1. First, in the Word template editor, go to Define conditional sections in the right panel.

2. Then, click New.

3. Next, give your condition a name (like “Outdoor” or “Corporate”), and select the field to base the condition on (like “Event Type”). Set the condition (for example, Event Type equals “Corporate”).

4. Then click Save.

5. Now, highlight the section of text in your document that should only appear when that condition is met. Finally, click Map to link that section to your condition.

Furthermore, you can create multiple conditional sections! For instance:

• Outdoor section — shows only when Event Type equals Outdoor.
• Corporate section — shows only when Event Type equals Corporate.
• Large Event section — shows only when Expected Guests is greater than 200.

In addition, you can base conditions on choice fields, number fields, and more. Then, when an end user fills out the form, only the relevant sections appear in the generated document.

💡 Tip: If your conditional sections depend on specific field values, make sure those fields are marked as required on the form. Otherwise, a user could skip the field and the document wouldn’t know which sections to include.

6. When you’re done editing, click Publish and open in Forms at the bottom right, to push your changes live.

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🔗 Step 6 – Share the Form with End Users

Once your SharePoint structured documents template is published, you’re ready to share it with end users, so that they can fill out the form.

1. First, go to Forms in your document library.

2. Then, click on your form and Copy the link.

3. Then you can share that link with your end users via email, Teams, a SharePoint page — wherever makes sense.

When end users open the link, they see a clean form. They simply fill in the fields and submit. As a result, a completed Word document (or PDF) is instantly generated and placed in the designated folder in your library. By default, the file name will be the person’s name with an incrementing number.

Also, remember: the people filling out these forms do not need access to the SharePoint site. They just need the link.

📑 Step 7 – Generate a PDF Instead of a Word Document

Want the output to be a PDF instead of a Word document? In my experience, this is a really common scenario — especially when you don’t want anyone editing the document after it’s been submitted.

First, go to Forms in your document library, and click on your form name and go to Settings. Then, toggle on Generate PDF from response.

That’s it! From now on, every form submission will generate a PDF in the library, instead of a Word document.

⚠️ Note: PDF generation is not supported for encrypted templates or templates with sensitivity labels.

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📧 Bonus – Email the Generated Document with Power Automate

The person who fills out the form might not have access to the document library where the file is stored. So how do you get them a copy? Fortunately, Power Automate comes to the rescue!

Here’s how to create a simple flow that emails the generated document to the person who submitted the form:

1. First, go to Power Automate and create a new flow.

2. For the trigger, choose the SharePoint trigger When a file is created (properties only). Select your site and document library, and set the Folder to the folder where your generated documents are stored.

3. Next, add a Send an email (V2) action. In the To field, I’m using the dynamic content Created By Email. You could set this up to mail to absolutely anyone, though. Finally, write your subject line and body. You can also include dynamic content like the event name or other metadata from the file.

Option A — Send a link (best practice):

If the end user has access to the SharePoint library, simply include the Link to item dynamic content as a hyperlink in the email body, as you see in my screenshot above. This is always the best practice because it maintains one source of truth, with no copies floating around.

Option B — Send as an attachment:

On the other hand, if the end user does NOT have access to the library, you can instead attach the file to the email:

Add a SharePoint action Get file content before the email step. For the File Identifier, use the dynamic content file identifier from the trigger.

Then, in the Send an email action, go to Advanced parameters and add an attachment. Set the Attachment Name to the File name with extension. Set the Attachment Content to the File Content from the Get file content action.

Keep in mind that sending an attachment is much more complicated than just including a link. However, we covered both options so you can decide which approach works best for your scenario. Save your flow, and now every time someone fills out the form, they’ll automatically receive an email with either a link or the actual document attached (or both, as seen in my video demo below).

Here’s the whole flow:

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🔔 Other Handy Settings

While you’re in the form settings for your SharePoint structured documents form, also check out a few more options:

• Notify me — so that you get notified every time someone submits a response.
• Date range — for instance, you can restrict form submissions to a specific date range.
• Branching logic — similarly to Microsoft Forms, you can set up branching logic so that certain questions appear based on how previous questions were answered.

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions About SharePoint Structured Documents

Can form fields have default values? Currently, no. Unfortunately, the SharePoint structured documents form interface does not support default values for fields. Even if you try to set a default value through the traditional SharePoint column settings, it won’t carry over to the form.

Do end users need a Copilot license? No! Only the person creating the template needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. In other words, end users just fill out the form — no special license needed.

Do end users need access to the SharePoint site? No. You simply share the form link with them and they can fill it out without having permissions to the document library. However, if you want to send them a link to the generated document (instead of an attachment), they would need access.

Can I customize the generated file name? Not currently. Instead, the file name defaults to the submitter’s name with an incrementing number.

Is this feature available in my tenant? SharePoint structured documents is currently rolling out. Therefore, it may not be available in your tenant yet.

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🎯 Why SharePoint Structured Documents Is a Game Changer

In my 20+ years using SharePoint, I’ve set up countless projects that required filling in Word documents from metadata. Between Quick Parts and Power Automate flow actions, it always took a significant amount of time and effort. However, SharePoint structured documents changes everything.

Above all, the combination of AI-detected fields, the brand new Word editing interface, and especially those conditional sections makes this one of the most exciting SharePoint features I’ve seen in a long time. Because of this, I highly recommend getting a Microsoft 365 Copilot license for at least the person who will be creating these templates — the time savings alone are worth it.

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Resources:

• My post: Forms on SharePoint Libraries
• My post: Populate document templates with Power Automate & Quick Parts
• My post: Populating Word Templates in SharePoint with Power Automate

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