Use Python to automate the Microsoft Word Weekly Report Task

I need to figure a workflow to automate the process of creating a new Microsoft Word document as weekly report. Althrough I’ve written an article about using Python to handle the task of generating powerpoint slides based on a template, this blog dicusses mainly on Microsoft Word document and how to use previous weeks report as the template for the upcoming week’s report.

Defining the task

For this blog, I need to create a report in a weekly manner based on pervious week’s report. I need to update some info, remove some paragraphs for new content and retain some of the contents for reuse. This sounds a bit complicated as it does not rely on a specific template but to use the last week’s report as the template, kind of like a recursive neural network.

Although I don’t have a clue on how to use Python to interact with Word document, I do have experience on interacting with powerpoint files, excel spreadsheet is so radically different from Word and Powerpoint in terms of accessing, managing and editting the content, those experience may not be useful at all. Before doing research, all I know about Word file is a compressed archive with some sort of xml contents to manage all media and data within.