First off I'm bias, as I'm a software developer and in the past have done quite a bit of office automation as a contractor.
If you really want to automate and produce rapid documents, you (well a programmer) can take it a bit further and write an application on top the macro's and spreadsheets which can automate a lot of tasks.
It depends what your time, is worth to you.
I'd be interested in hearing what the documents are, and as a exercise for myself seeing if I could automate one. Bit rusty at this kinda stuff now.