Apple macOS and Document Templates (Excel & Word)

Part 6 of the series about the new Mac Mini M4 and Power Platform, this time I will check the built-in template functionality available in model-driven apps.

This functionality allows to upload a template (Excel or Word) and users can download a document with data coming from the app.

An important thing to remember is that Excel templates are applied to views and Word templates are applied to a single record.

Let's start with Excel templates: the documentation is pretty straightforward, with the Mac version of Excel I was able to update the template and uploaded it again back to the model-driven app.

Word templates are not possible to create with the Mac version of Word, as written inside the documentation, we need to use the XML Mapping pane (under the Developer tab) but this functionality is not available inside the Word for Mac, it's only available inside the Windows version:

I took this screenshot from Word installed inside the virtual machine (check the first post if you need to setup it), so no problems to use it with Windows 11 Arm64 edition.

It's a bummer I can't use Word for Mac for creating templates but the Mac Mini M4 is very fast, the virtual machine has only 4 GB of RAM and Word runs perfectly.

Also some customers use third party add-ons to generate documents inside the Power Platform instead of the standard Word templates.