Issue - MS Word 2007 Doc from Template

The Word from Template smart service does not sanitize passed-in text, meaning some of the special characters used in WordML (the special XML flavor used in the back-end in word documents) will cause the document to "break" if passed in un-sanitized.

Do I need to use any kind of functions to avoid this issue. Please advise.

You beat me to it, lol - yes, a long time ago I developed the following expression rule that all un-sanitized text should be passed through when using this smart service.  Note this is only really needed when the incoming text will be variable (i.e. where there's a possibility that special characters will sneak in).  This is what I still use now.

/* Expression Rule i.e. APP_UTIL_sanitizeTextForWordDocx */

a!localVariables(
  local!characters: {
    "&",
    ">",
    "<",
    char(10),
    char(13)
  }, /* the ordering of these is important. */

  local!replacements: {
    tohtml("&"),
    tohtml(">"),
    tohtml("<"),
    </w:t><w:br/> <w:t>,  /* inserts a Word linebreak */
    ""
  },

  reduce(
    fn!substitute,
    trim(ri!input),
    a!forEach(
      local!characters,
      {
        fv!item,
        local!replacements[fv!index]
      }
    )
  )
)