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Generate a document and then edit it

If you want to generate a document then edit it before sending it or downloading it , you have a few options:

  1. First thing to consider is if you want to edit it in Google Docs. This would be our recommended process. The other option is to just download the file in Word, then open it and edit within Word, then save as a PDF manually.
  2. You should configure your Document Action to generate the Google Doc only and not output to PDF. Configure it to save the Google Doc URL to a custom text field that you create on your object (see this article for more information on how to create this URL field). Create the button to say something like “Generate Document” since this button/action is all about just generating the Google Doc, not sending it.
  3. Once you have the Google Doc URL saved in the field, without doing anything else you can click the link in that field from the page layout which will open the Google Doc in the browser. Then you can edit it from there. All changes made are saved in real time on Google Docs.
  4. Optionally you could add a formula field or Visualforce section to embed the Google Doc directly into your page layout so you can always and immediately see and edit it from within Salesforce. See this article if would like to learn how to embed the google doc into your page layout.