WordPress and Gravity Forms are both awesome. But, for a long time, there’s been a gap in what the ecosystem can do in the realm of document automation. This has been the case because either:

• you had to pipe your data to or otherwise rely on third party hosted services; or
• your options were limited to PDF output, or document output that did not accommodate conditional content.

Solutions that require you to pipe your data to or otherwise rely on third party hosted services can result in a loss of control over your data, as well as potentially expensive monthly or annual fees. Solutions that limit you to PDF output restrict what you or your clients or customers can do with the generated output. And solutions that enable output to .doc or .docx formats but do not support conditional content are just too limited for any use case where chunks of content need to be included or excluded depending on what a person enters into a form.

GravityMerge is changing all that, and it’s doing it in multiple ways that support the needs of a wide range of industries, professions (including the legal profession which has particular needs when it comes to hierarchical numbering styles) and use cases:

• It’s enabling the production of automated documentary outputs based on underlying Word/docx templates that contain direct merge tags and conditional merge tags, bringing to WordPress true and powerful document automation that benefits from the richness of Microsoft Word document formatting.
• It’s enabling the production of automated documentary outputs where conditional content processing is done within Gravity Forms itself, through the use of either a form’s conditional logic or Gravity Forms’ own conditional merge tags, with the conditional output you see on your confirmation screen or persistent confirmation page being available for download in docx format.
• It’s enabling you to use a customised “all fields” merge tag in your form confirmations that supports the inclusion of HTML fields and the exclusion of empty fields, together with a document download option.
• It’s enabling you to see legal-style hierarchical/ordered numbering in the classic editor, block editor, Gravity Forms rich text paragraph field, Gravity Forms confirmation screen, and HTML-to-DOCX downloads.

Oh, and for those who like to throw in a bit of ChatGPT-style AI, with GravityWiz’s awesome OpenAI plugin you can get OpenAI to process content for you based on how someone answers questions in your form, and include the ChatGPT-style output within your automated output that you make available for download.

To learn more and get your hands on these plugins, take a look at GravityMerge.