A system and method is disclosed for generating XSL transformation documents. A software wizard presents a series of screens to lead the user through the authoring process. The screens include a load screen, a select screen, a new entity screen, a conditional screen, and a view screen. The load screen prompts the user for an input document name. The wizard then retrieves XML entities from the input document and presents them to the user in tree form on the select screen. The user selects entities from the tree for inclusion in the output document. The new entity screen allows the user to create new entities for inclusion in the output document. These entities are accumulated in an output list. The conditional screen allows the user to make entities from the output list conditional. The view screen allows review of a tentative transformation document that will accomplish the user's purpose.