Highlighting Word documents

Creating templates in ClauseBuddy starts with highlighting words in an existing DOCX (Word) document. While very easy to get started with, there are few details you may want to be aware of.

Highlighting in cyan

In ClauseBuddy, placeholders must be highlighted in cyan (light blue).

You can switch to cyan highlighting by clicking the down-triangle within the Microsoft Word toolbar:

Speeding up the highlighting process

Microsoft Word contains many advanced search-and-replace options that can help you speed up the highlighting process. You may want to read all the details (alternative, somewhat lighter explanation), but let's recap the most important parts below.

First off: you want to open the Advanced Find dialog box through Word's toolbar, navigate to the Replace part, and clock on >> More to show the entire dialog box.

Next, you probably want to assign a cyan highlight to whatever you find. To make this happen, you have to insert your cursor on the Replace with part, click on the Format button at the bottom of the dialog box and activate Highlight. Your dialog box will then indicate that the highlighting is activated:

The next part is a bit more difficult: learning the special "wildcard" codes that Word makes available. With these special wildcards, you can find text with variable parts — e.g., to find all text between square brackets.

You first have to active the wildcard-mode by enabling the Use wildcards option in the bottom part of the dialog box.

There are many types of wildcards, e.g. to search for parts of word, specific characters, and so on. Furthermore, you can search for special special characters — e.g. page breaks or tab characters, by clicking on the Special button at the bottom of the dialog box.

However, specifically for our highlighting purposes, let's look at the most interesting ones:

Highlighting text between square brackets

Yes, this looks like gibberish, but let's break it down step by step.

• In the Find what part, you are looking for any kind of text between square brackets. The asterisk symbol * represents this "any kind" of text".
• By using parentheses (round brackets), you tell word that you want to remember a certain part, so that you can reuse it during the replacement operation. You therefore have to wrap the asterisk in round brackets.
• Finally, you want to only find stuff between square brackets. You therefore have to insert square brackets. But there's a catch: within the Find what box, the square brackets have a special meaning to Word (they allow you to search for character ranges, e.g. lowercase letters a-z), while we want to literally search for square brackets. You therefore have to prefix the square bracket with a backspace.
• Note the \1 part in the Replace with box: this means "I actually want to insert the characters you remembered in the first pair of round brackets". (If you would happen to have multiple parts between round brackets in your Find what box, then you can recall them by using \1 and then \2 and \3 and so on.)
• Also note that we did not insert any square brackets in the Replace with: part. For ClauseBuddy, you do not need anything to be surrounded with square brackets.

Example:

becomes the following when pressing Replace All (or multiple Replace operations):

Highlighting text between double curly braces

Some templates use double curly braces {{text}} to indicate variable parts:

This probably looks even funnier due to all the backslashes, but the principle is the same:

• find all text (asterisk) between curly braces
• precede each opening/closing curly brace with a backslash, because — similar to the square brackets — the curly braces have a special meaning
• remember the stuff that was found by putting \1 between round parentheses

For example:

becomes:

Note that in the above example we actually limited our search to only text that was already highlighted. This was probably not strictly necessary (because in the example the text between double curly braces was always highlighted), but mostly for educational purposes.

Highlighting text between parentheses and some blob

As a final example, let's look at templates that happen to use (● text) to indicate variable parts.

Once again: backspaces before a character with special meaning to Word (i.e., the outer round brackets), round brackets around text you want to remember, and an asterisk to indicate "any text".

Example:

Becomes:

Use keyboard shortcuts!

Another very helpful way to speed up the highlighting process, is by assigning keyboard shortcuts to the add highlight and remove highlight operations in MS Word. You can do so as follows:

• Go to File > Options > Customize Ribbon
• At the bottom of the Customize the Ribbon and keyboard shortcuts pane, click on the Customize button.
• In the upper left box, navigate to All Commands.
• In the upper right box, navigate to the Highlight command.
• Position your cursor within Press new shortcut key and press a relevant shortcut — e.g., Ctrl + Alt + H, and next press the Assign button.
• Do the same with the HighlightOff command, e.g. assign it shortcut Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H, or any other that works for you.
• Close the dialog boxes and go back to your document.

Now, when you select text, you can press the relevant shortcut to add or remove highlighting.

For more details, see Microsoft's web page.

Placeholders

A placeholder is a piece of text that will get replaced by an answer to an associated question within the questionnaire. For example, in the following sentence, the order amount and the delivery date are placeholders, highlighted in cyan.

When you then create two questions corresponding to those placeholders, ClauseBuddy will automatically replace the cyan words with the answer to those questions. 

Conditional text

Conditional text is created by highlighting a condition + colon + conditional text. In the following example, the text "taking into account Customer's preferred delivery schedule" will only be shown when condition "softened" is met.

You can "chain" multiple conditions by inserting the vertical pipe symbol. For example, instead of writing

...you can also write the following, which more clearly expresses the author's intent that one of several options will need to be chosen. ClauseBuddy will then insert the first text for which the associated condition is met:

If each of the conditions has a structure similar "x = y", you can also write this more concisely:

Another advantage of using the pipe operator is that you can easily insert a final "catch all" part — using else: — which will apply when none of the previous conditions was met.

Conditional paragraphs

An entire paragraph can be subjected to a condition by positioning that condition at the start of the paragraph. For example, the following paragraph will only be shown when the delivery location is known (also note the "location" placeholder, which will be replaced by the actual location, as answered by the end-user):

There are many different ways to express conditions, as further explained in the separate article on conditions.

Dealing with automatic numbering

The question arises what happens to the numbering of subsequent paragraphs when an entire paragraph is dropped because some condition is not met.

For example, assume that the delivery location is not known, so that the second paragraph will get dropped in the next example. When the end-user creates a PDF or DOCX file, ClauseBuddy will automatically update the numbering, so that the last paragraph ("Some subsequent paragraph") will get number 2.

However, this only functions correctly when you are properly using Microsoft Word's automatic numbering features. When, instead, you would "hardcode" numbers — i.e., explicitly type in the number of each paragraph — your document will get stuck on incorrect numbering.

Do note that — due to the complexity involved — the automatic changes in the numbering will not be shown interactively on the screen. You can rest assured, however, that everything will be correct when you ask ClauseBuddy to create a DOCX or PDF file.

Spaces

ClauseBuddy will automatically remove multiple consecutive spaces that happen to get inserted due to conditional text.

In the following example, the condition "softened" will cause softening language to get inserted. If that condition is not met (so that the ", acting reasonably," gets removed), you would end up with two consecutive spaces (one space exists after Supplier and one exists before will). In such scenarios, ClauseBuddy will automatically remove the double space.