I am a property manager and want to create a tool to be used by my team to populate lease documents. The ideal scenario would be for the first page of the lease to have a chart that is filled out once with information such as:

Address: 123 House Lane
Landlord: Home Management, LLC
Tenant: Bert and Ernie
Lease Start Date: 1/1/17
etc....

I would like to fill this chart out once and have the referenced fields auto-populate our standard lease document. For example the first line would read:

"This Agreement, made this date, January 1, 2017 between Home Management, LLC (a Pennsylvania limited partnership), Lessor (also known as Landlord), Bert and Ernie (hereinafter called Tenant)."

My most recent attempt is in Word 2016 by inserting a chart and populating the cells using the developer content control tools. I then highlighted each piece and, from the insert tab, link panel, created bookmarks. Within the lease text, I then inserted fields and selected REF and the applicable bookmark.

This gives the desired effect for a one time use, but considering this is to be used as a tool for others, it is WAY too easy for the bookmarks to be deleted and way too difficult to type within the bookmark brackets. Protecting only a selection of the document does not work. I figured out that if you make a bookmark by selecting the entire cell instead of just the word, you can't delete the bookmarks as easily. Problem is that the inserted REF literally populates the lease with a one line cell and therefore breaks up the format and paragraph flow.

A few questions:
Is there a way to link the unformatted contents of the cell instead of the cell itself?
Or is there a way to make the bookmarks permanent while leaving their contents editable? From what I have read, no.
Would it be better to just create this document in Excel but read as a Word doc?

Thank you for your thoughts!
Hannah