How to Save and Use Styles from Existing Word File With python-docx

Creating Word documents using the Python Docx package is very powerful and allows us to present our data and findings in an automated way.

In corporate settings, when working with Word and other Office products, usually you will have standards for branding and different templates for each document you produce.

When creating Word documents using Python Docx, starting from an existing template can be very useful and save us a lot of work.

Sometimes though, all we have is an existing document, and we want to start from scratch using the same styles from that existing document.

Getting these styles is easy, but we have to do a little work outside of Python.

How to Save and Use Styles from Existing Word File With Python Docx

When I wanted to use the styles from an existing document, I first tried saving that document as a Word template (a dotx file), but after doing this, I was getting an error.

import docx

doc = docx.Document("some_template.dotx") #this threw an error

I resolved this very simply by just opening up “some_template.dotx” in Microsoft Word, and saving it as a .docx file.

Now, we can access all of the styles from the

import docx

doc = docx.Document("some_template.docx")

#we can access all of the styles in doc.styles

While some of you might want a programmatic way to solve this problem, I found it was very easy to just save this template as a new file, and with this new file, we can solve the problem of having access to all of the necessary styles.

Hopefully this article has been very helpful in answering your question on using existing styles from an existing dotx document, and has allowed you to get on to creating your program to automate Word documents.

Let me know if you have any questions and thank you for reading.