I am in the process of generating Word documents using Perl as well, I didn't think about Office HTML, but about 5 years ago I made some RTF documents from a shell script, so I started from scratch and tried that again from Perl, which has turned out to be very easy...

I reverse engineered an RTF document by saving a basic one, then stripping out tags using a text editor till I had the bare bones of what I needed and nothing else. (and it would still open without crashing Word!) This is what I found works as a basis:

http://ref.a32.net/technical/file_format/rtf/basic_table_rtf_source.txt

Although I expect it's more flexible and robust to use horrible Office HTML as people have pointed out - if you can handle that

You say you have "Word Template fields" - from my memories of my days of working with that stuff - you use that for doing a mail-merge with a master (now called "main"?) document right?

If that's the case then all you should have to do is export to some database-like format (possibly Excel compatible HTML, or even just CSV - TOO easy!) and then do a mail merge... pulling the data from that document/file into Word...

I've just looked in the help in Word where it says:

"What types of data sources can I use? You can use just about any type of data source that you want, including a Word table, Microsoft Outlook contact list, Excel worksheet, Microsoft Access database, or ASCII text file. If you haven't already stored information in a data source, Word guides you step by step through setting up a Word table that contains your names, addresses, and other data."

Try this Office help link in I.E. if you're using Word 2000:
mk:@MSITStore:C:\Program%20Files\Microsoft%20Office\Office\1033\wdmain9.chm::/html/wdconOverviewOfMailMerge.htm

Or just crank up Macro$haft Wurd Help and type in "mail merge" :o)

IHTH...