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Do you mean for general workflow tasks, or for creating documents given a set of data?

For workflow tasks, Automator.app on OSX is pretty great, even for non-programmers. There's probably something analogous on windows/other OSes.

For document generation... that seems like a fun weekend hack. I'm imagining some kind of more configurable madlibs-style app.

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Microsoft Word can already do the document generation thing from an Excel spreadsheet. Of course, it’s more complicated than a purpose-built app would be, but probably also more powerful.

Here's a description of how MS Word and MS Excel were actually used to create 4,600 parameterized web pages, complete with samples of the Excel and Word documents used:

http://www.horniman.info/DOCUMNTS/HOWTO.HTM

Scroll down to section 6, "Webpages" for explanation of this topic.

The generated website is also live online at

http://www.horniman.info/

so the generated HTML can be easily inspected.

The latter

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