Is there a way to do this in Microsoft word?

[Legoblockskillfeet]

I work with word a lot. Management are about to introduce a new template for one of our documents which would mean having to cut and paste from each existing doc to transfer it onto new paperwork. This is going to generate a lot of work for our already overwhelmed team.
Do any clever people know of a way to speed this up?
I'm wondering whether there is so e kind of way if telling the new document where to pull the information from and it being copied across automatically?

Any ideas would be brilliant. I have tried google but am not sure what to search so am getting nowhere.

Depending on the type of info and how it's currently stored, what about a mail merge?

Could a mail merge work? You'd have to transfer it first to excel then pluck the merge from there into word.

Why are you not just using new template for new documents from x date onwards? Old documents stay in the old format?

I thought about a mail merge too but I think that’s a one off, not something you can do ongoing, automatically.

is the template being designed in-house? If so can the designers code it so it populates with what you need?

Sounds like the way they’re proposing is very risky, and I would point out the danger of human error in copying and pasting.

Depends on how different the 2 are. One way to try is to to put all or most headings from old doc into new, and copy perhaps the first and last paragraphs of old doc into new. Save. Go to the review button and compare. Choose create new document. A new document should be formed with track changes, accept and reject as needed.
Another is to just copy whole old doc into new template and accept every paragraph or section for new format.
Or tell management old document will retain older features as its costly (time wise) for you to make changes. You will use new template for all future docs.

Is it just font/colours/bullets or is it a front and last page with images and such.

If it's just a layout/colours/font issue then. What you can do is open the new document, go to 'Themes' save it as a theme on your device, then open the old documents, go to 'Themes' and choose the theme you have just created. That should change all the headings, text, bullets etc to the new preferred styles.

It won't add on a new front and last page if they've created those.

To try to answer some of the questions above and make it clearer

The document will probably be quite similar. They are tables or text boxes with quite a lot of text in each section.

We work with hundreds of the same format each week but these are unique to the company that they come from.

The company updates them with tracked changes on and they we edit and formalise the changes.

This is done 6 monthly so starting with the new doc on x date wont work as the reports will need to be put into the new format for update as they come in.

Copying and pasting to excel for mail merge would take as long as copying into he new format as each one is unique.

It's going to be a huge undertaking.

It's likely that the same information will need to be out into a different box in the new format, rather than it just being a formatting issue.

I’m fairly certain Microsoft Power Automate can do this. I’ve never used it to take information from one word document to put on another but have used it to take information from excel or forms to put into word templates. The principle is the same, so I’d imagine it can be done.

Is the source document in word?

If so, can you change the fonts, line spacing, header/footer, table styles in the source document, to match the new template?

There are only so many things you can edit in Word - hopefully it's easier to change the styles over transcribing!

It is in word but all it tables and text boxes