Word Document Templates: Bring Your Own Contracts Into Deep Space

Published 7 September 2026 Your subcontract agreements, purchase orders and letters already exist as Word files, drafted by your lawyers, formatted to your letterhead, argued over for years. Until now, getting them out of Deep Space meant using our layouts or re-keying record data into your own. Word Document Templates closes that gap. You upload your .docx, tag the parts that change, and every generated document comes back as a finished PDF with your formatting intact and your project data filled in. Admins manage templates under Admin, Document Templates. Your team generates from the registers they already work in. Your published document templates, with Word uploads sitting alongside the built-in layouts. Features Your Word File Is the Template As a contracts administrator, I had to accept whatever layout the platform gave me, so I can now upload our own executed subcontract and have Deep Space fill it in. Before. Your document lived in Word. The record data lived in Deep Space. Bridging the two meant exporting figures and typing them into a file by hand, or accepting a generic layout your legal team never signed off on. After. Upload the .docx to Admin, Document Templates. Deep Space stores the file exactly as it is (every font, table, header, footer, logo and clause untouched) and drops you into a full-page workbench with your document rendered in the preview. Anywhere live data should appear, the document carries a small placeholder called a variable, written as ${variable_name}. Impact. The legal wording you paid for is the wording that goes out. Nothing is re-typed, nothing is approximated, and the preview you see on screen is produced by the same engine that generates the final PDF, so what you preview is what you get. The workbench in Template mode: your Word file rendered on the right, every variable in the document listed on the left. Tag the Changing Parts, No Syntax Required As an admin setting up templates, I did not want to learn a templating language, so I can now point at wording in my own document and turn it into a live field. Before. Making a document data-aware usually means learning a token syntax and hand-editing a file until it works. After. Three routes, and most customers only ever use the first two: Accept the suggestions. If your document already spells out your company name, ABN, contractor licence, address or phone, Deep Space recognises them and lists each under Suggested variables. Click Tag and every occurrence in the document becomes the matching variable. Zero typing. Find and Tag. Copy a piece of text exactly as it appears (a client name, a payment term like 30 days, a date), paste it into the Find and Tag box, pick the variable it should become, and click Tag every occurrence. Deep Space edits the Word file itself, preserves the surrounding formatting, and refreshes the preview immediately. Type variables in Word. Once you know the names, write ${subcontractor_name} straight into the document before uploading. Variables are recognised even when Word has split the text into differently formatted pieces behind the scenes, and a name we do not recognise is not an error, it simply becomes a field the person filling in the document types at generate time. Impact. A contracts admin can turn a 12-page subcontract into a working template in a sitting, without a developer and without a support ticket. Starting from a blank legal template with empty spaces? Fill each blank with a distinctive placeholder (for example SUBCONTRACTOR-NAME-HERE) and run Find and Tag over those. Suggested variables, Find and Tag, and the variables already in the template, each marked auto-fills or filled in at generate time. Variables Your Workspace Defines Itself As an admin, I needed fields specific to how we run projects, so I can now define my own variables and use them in every template immediately. Before. You were limited to the fields the platform knew about. Anything else was a manual edit after the fact. After. Add your own under the custom. prefix with New variable in the workbench, in three kinds: Constant. Always fills with a fixed value you set once, for example ${custom.company_slogan}. Record field. Pulls a named field from the record the document is generated from, for example ${custom.site_supervisor} reading the record's site contact. Prompt. Asks the person generating the document to type a value, with an optional default, for example ${custom.special_conditions}. Impact. They work across every template straight away, with no involvement from Deep Space. Your naming, your fields, your call. Line Items Print Themselves As a contracts administrator issuing a subcontract with a 40-line schedule of values, I used to paste the schedule in by hand every time, so I can now let one table row expand into the full list. Before. Every line item was a copy, a paste and a formatting fix. Long schedules were where errors crept in. After. Add one row to a Word table using the ${item.*} variables (${item.no}, ${item.description}, ${item.code}, ${item.qty}, ${item.unit}, ${item.rate}, ${item.amount}). When a document is generated, that row repeats once per line of the source record, keeping your table's formatting. Generated from a subcontract, the rows come from its Schedule of Values. From a purchase order, its order lines. Use only the columns your table needs. Impact. A schedule that used to take 20 minutes to transcribe now prints itself, correctly, every time. In the workbench preview the row template stays visible on purpose so you can check its formatting before publishing. Draft and Published Versions As an admin, I worried about editing a template while my team was generating contracts from it, so I can now amend a locked version safely. Before. Editing a live template meant risking a change landing mid-generation. After. Tagging and file replacement are available while a template is a Draft. Once Published, the version is locked so documents being generated from it cannot change under your team's feet. To amend a published template, use Clone and Edit, which creates a new draft version. Publish it when it is ready. Every published version is kept. Impact. Version history you can point to in an audit, and no surprises for the person halfway through issuing a contract. Generate With a Live Preview As a project manager issuing documents, I wanted to see the finished contract before it left the building, so I can now watch the PDF render as I fill it in. Before. Generate, download, open, spot the mistake, start again. After. From a record's Generate Document (or when sending documents from a register), choose your template. Values that map to the record, your Company Settings or project settings are pre-filled, and you can override any of them for this one document without touching the template. Unrecognised variables and Prompt-type variables appear as input fields. Turn on Show preview to watch the rendered PDF update as you type (it refreshes about a second after you stop). Output the finished PDF, or download the filled-in DOCX if you need the Word version. Impact. Mistakes get caught on screen instead of in the client's inbox. Simulated mode fills the same document with sample and Company Settings data, so what you preview is what you get. What Deep Space will do Store the exact Word file you upload, unchanged, and give it back to you on request at any time. Preserve your formatting end to end: fonts, styles, tables (including nested tables), images, headers and footers, page setup. Fill variables wherever they appear: body text, tables, headers and footers. Recognise variables even when Word has fragmented the text internally. Render previews and final documents through one and the same pipeline, so the preview is faithful. Expand a ${item.*} table row once per line item of the source record. Treat unknown variable names as manual fill-in fields rather than failing or printing blanks silently. Keep every published version, with new versions made explicitly (Clone and Edit, then Publish). What Deep Space will not do Change your document's wording, layout or formatting on its own. Only tagged variables are replaced. Offer in-browser Word editing. Formatting changes are made in Word (download the DOCX, edit, upload via Replace file). Invent data. A variable with no value at generate time is presented for manual entry, and anything left unresolved stays visibly in ${token} form rather than disappearing. Alter a Published version. Amendments always go through a new draft. A note on fonts. PDF conversion supports all common document fonts (Calibri, Arial, Times New Roman, Cambria and similar). If your template uses a rare or licensed font the converter does not have, a closest-match substitute is used in the PDF, so check the Simulated preview, which shows you the true output. The Word file itself always keeps your original fonts. Getting started Upload. Admin, Document Templates, Upload Word Template, choose your .docx. Set the Category and Type (this controls where the template is offered and which record fields fill in automatically) and the Title your team will see. Tag the changing parts. The workbench opens automatically. Accept the suggested variables, or use Find and Tag. Check the preview. Switch the preview to Simulated to see the document rendered with sample and company data. Template mode shows the raw tokens. Publish when it is ready for your team. Generate. Open a record (a subcontract, purchase order, claim) and choose Generate Document. Template management sits with workspace administrators. Generating documents is available to your team from the relevant registers. Keep the feedback coming, we're here to listen to you, and thanks for your support.