Many companies already have the core of a CPQ system (Configure, Price, Quote) sitting quietly in Excel. Spreadsheets hold the product catalog, pricing tables, discount rules, and approval thresholds that sales and finance teams rely on every day. What’s usually missing is a scalable way to turn that logic into a proper online quoting experience for sales teams and then into a polished, customer‑facing proposal without hours of copy‑paste work. That’s exactly where SpreadsheetWeb’s CPQ capabilities come in.
CPQ software is generally defined as a set of tools that help sellers configure the right product, calculate the correct price, and quickly generate accurate quotes and proposals. Traditional CPQ platforms often require you to rebuild your configuration and pricing rules inside their own engines. SpreadsheetWeb takes a different approach: it lets Excel remain the brain, and builds both the online quoting interface and the document generation layer on top of your existing workbook.
Excel as the Hidden CPQ Engine
At its core, SpreadsheetWeb is a no‑code platform that converts Excel workbooks into secure, database‑backed web applications. For CPQ scenarios, that means you can take the workbook your team already uses for pricing and turn it into an online quoting tool where sales reps (or even partners and customers) can handle configuration, pricing, and quoting through a browser instead of editing files on their desktop.
The process typically starts with your existing pricing model. You upload the workbook into SpreadsheetWeb, define which cells become inputs (such as product choices, quantities, regions, or contract terms), and which cells represent outputs (totals, margins, recommended options, internal flags). SpreadsheetWeb then generates a web application around that logic. Reps can log in, walk through guided configuration screens, and let Excel calculate everything behind the scenes in real time.
If you’d like to see how this looks in practice, the articles on building quoting applications with SpreadsheetWeb and configuring SpreadsheetWeb Hub as a sales quoting portal walk through concrete examples of Excel‑based pricing models becoming full online CPQ tools.
Once this online CPQ app is in place, you’ve covered the “Configure” and “Price” parts of CPQ: users can configure products and options using your own rules, and they see pricing instantly, calculated by the same formulas that used to live only on someone’s machine.
Document generation as the “Quote” layer in CPQ
The third piece of CPQ is the “Quote”: turning a configured, priced deal into a professional proposal or quote document you can send to a prospect. Traditionally, that step has meant exporting numbers from Excel, pasting them into a Word template, and manually adding product descriptions, specs, images, and legal text. SpreadsheetWeb treats this step as a natural extension of the same Excel model that powers your quoting app.
Using SpreadsheetWeb’s Dynamic Document Generation and related document creation tools, you can map cells and named ranges from your workbook into document templates, typically in Word format that will later be rendered to PDF. The same formulas that calculate prices can also drive which content appears in the final document. For example, when a rep selects a particular product combination in the web app, Excel can set flags that say, in effect: “include this product section,” “skip this spec page,” or “add this legal clause.” SpreadsheetWeb then uses those signals to build a proposal that’s tailored to the configuration, not just a generic document with a different price.
In a sales quoting application, that can look like this in practice: a rep logs into the CPQ app, configures a solution for a prospect, and clicks a button to generate a proposal. Behind the scenes, the workbook calculates pricing and also determines which descriptive paragraphs, product specification sections, and attachments are relevant. The document generator pulls in copy for the selected products, inserts images, and includes product‑specific legal language based on the rules defined in Excel. The result is a quote document that reflects the exact configuration and pricing logic the rep used, without any manual editing.
Dynamic, product‑specific content and multi‑template assembly
One of the strengths of SpreadsheetWeb’s approach is how easily it supports product‑specific content and multi‑part proposals. Because everything is driven by worksheet formulas and mappings, the same quoting app can generate very different documents depending on what’s being sold.
If a prospect is interested in Product A, the system can insert language, technical specs, and images specific to that product. If Product B is also part of the deal, the proposal can append additional sections that describe B’s capabilities, along with any special terms or implementation details. Region‑ or industry‑specific clauses can be added automatically when Excel determines that certain conditions are met, such as a particular country, vertical, or regulatory context. From the user’s perspective, it still feels like a single “Generate Proposal” action, but under the hood, the system is assembling content based on detailed logic in the spreadsheet.
This approach extends naturally to assembling a final proposal from multiple templates. Instead of maintaining one huge, monolithic document, you can manage a set of reusable templates—cover letters, core proposal bodies, pricing schedules, appendices, and various legal addenda. SpreadsheetWeb can then use Excel to decide which pieces to include in each scenario and merge them into a single, client‑ready document. The underlying mechanics of the print process are covered in SpreadsheetWeb’s print/document creation documentation, but the impact on sales teams is simple: fewer templates to maintain manually, and far less risk of forgetting the right attachment or section.
How this compares to traditional document platforms and CPQ systems
Traditional document platforms excel at template management, collaboration, approval workflows, and e‑signatures. They often include their own rule engines for conditional content, but they typically treat your pricing model as something external, you either upload flat data or rebuild key pricing and configuration rules inside their environment. That can work well when the document platform is the center of gravity, but it does mean running two parallel systems of logic: one in your CPQ or pricing tool, and another in the document system.
SpreadsheetWeb’s CPQ story is different because the web application and the documents are both powered by the same Excel workbook. The configure and price steps happen inside a SpreadsheetWeb app that runs your workbook on the server; the quote step is then generated from the very same model. When pricing, discount structures, eligibility rules, or product bundles change, your team updates the workbook, and those changes flow simultaneously into both the web quoting experience and the documents it produces. You’re not synchronizing rules between multiple platforms; you’re centralizing them in the place your organization already understands best.
From a CPQ theory standpoint, this aligns closely with standard definitions of CPQ software, which emphasize configuration rules, pricing engines, and automated quote document generation as three pillars of one system. SpreadsheetWeb simply chooses Excel as the expression of those rules, and then builds the CPQ experience around it.
Benefits of an Excel‑driven CPQ and document generation approach
The benefits of treating SpreadsheetWeb as a CPQ platform start with the sales team. Reps get an online quoting application that enforces configuration and pricing rules without forcing them to learn a new scripting language or wait for IT to make small rule changes. They can configure deals, see pricing immediately, and generate consistent, on‑brand proposals in minutes.
Finance and operations teams gain a single source of truth. Instead of maintaining one pricing model in Excel and another in a separate CPQ or document system, they keep everything in one workbook. That makes it easier to audit rules, update discounts, roll out new product bundles, and ensure that what’s in the quote matches what’s in the backend systems. The CPQ process (configure, price, and quote) is encoded once and reused everywhere.
Legal and compliance teams benefit from the ability to tie product‑ and region‑specific language directly to formula‑driven conditions. They can document which scenarios require which clauses in the workbook itself and know that the document generator will respect those rules consistently. For a broader discussion of how this kind of automation improves the efficiency and reliability of sales quotations, the SpreadsheetWeb blog article “What is a Sales Quotation? How to Improve Their Efficiency?” offers additional context.
Getting started with SpreadsheetWeb as your CPQ layer
If you already have a mature Excel pricing model, you’re much closer to a full CPQ system than you might think. A typical rollout begins with uploading your workbook into SpreadsheetWeb and turning it into a web application that sales teams can use for configuration and pricing. From there, you enable document generation by connecting the workbook to proposal templates and defining how the spreadsheet’s outputs drive document content.
SpreadsheetWeb provides a range of resources to guide this journey, including the main features overview, the detailed article on dynamic document generation, and scenario‑focused posts such as “Streamlining Project Proposals with SpreadsheetWeb Hub”.
The result is a cohesive CPQ solution: Excel powers configuration and pricing, SpreadsheetWeb delivers a user‑friendly web quoting experience, and the same logic produces dynamic, client‑ready proposal documents. Instead of stitching together separate tools and duplicating rules, you let your spreadsheet do what it already does best, only now, it does it for the entire configure‑price‑quote process.
