Populate multiple templates at once

Use Multi-populate to prepare multiple Woodpecker templates at once without having to open each one individually

Eszter Takacs avatar
Written by Eszter Takacs
Updated over a week ago

Save tons of time and eliminate duplicate data entry when you use Woodpecker's Multi-populate function, which allows you to draft multiple documents at the same time using the same information within each one (for example: “Client Name”, “Today’s Date”, “Client Address”, etc.).

Save documents to your Document Collection

To get started with Woodpecker’s “populate multiple” functionality simply save at least one of your Woodpecker templates to your personal Document Collection.

You can do this by clicking the “Save” icon in the top right corner of the app or by navigating to the "Collection" page via the menu and either adding the currently open document or uploading a new one.

This will save your document to your Document Collection so that the document can be automatically populated for you later.

TIP: File size should not exceed 7.5mb for Document Collection

Populating multiple documents at once

After you’ve saved one or more documents to your Document Collection, you’ll be able to populate multiple documents at the same time.

To start, open up one of the documents that you wish to populate in Word, launch Woodpecker, fill in the Woodpecker fields for this document, and instead of clicking the “Populate” button, click the “arrow” icon to the right of the “Populate” button.

Then select either “Populate Multiple as DOCX" or "Populate Multiple as PDF." These options will export your final documents as either .docx  files or as .pdf  files.

Selecting additional documents to populate

Woodpecker will display a list of the documents that are in your Document Collection for you to select. Select which documents you would like to populate in addition to the currently open document.

TIP: If you have organized the templates in your Document Collection into folders, the list of documents will be grouped into those folders when multi-populating. To expand a folder and view the documents, click on the icon adjacent to the folder name, as shown below.

Also, if you select the folder to multi-populate with, all documents within that folder will be populated. 

Give values to additional fields

After you have selected which documents you’d like to populate in addition to the currently open document, you may be required to specify values for any “additional fields.” Additional fields are fields that are present in one document but not another (only fields with the same name will be considered the same across multiple documents).

For example, if I had “Document 1” currently open and I selected to also populate “Document 2” and “Document 3”, I would be prompted to provide values for “Date” and for “Address”, since these two fields are not  present in my currently open document.

Document 1

“Client Name” - Single line text

“Today’s Date” - Date

Document 2

“Client Name” - Single line text

“Date” - Date [additional]

Document 3

“Client name” - Single line text

“Date” - Date [additional]

“Address” - Single line text [additional]

Note: Only fields with the exact same name will match when populating multiple documents. For example, if I had a “Today’s Date” field in one document and a “Date” field in another document, those fields would not match and I would be prompted to specify a value for the “Date” field in addition to “Today’s Date” field. To reduce the number of “additional fields” that you have to fill in when populating multiple documents, make sure to name identical fields with the same name in each document.

Using your prepared documents

After you’ve populated all of your documents, you will be presented with two methods for retrieving them. You can either download a zip file containing the prepared documents, or you can share a link to download the zip file containing the documents. 

Note: The shareable link to your prepared zip file will expire after 1 hour. At which point you will need to populate the documents again or simply share the zip folder which you’ve downloaded.

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