Selecting & Configuring paragraphs

Once you have uploaded one or more documents, you can start selecting and configuring paragraphs using the panel on the right side:

ClauseBuddy will split each document into paragraphs at different levels, using various clues available in the Word-document, such as the use of Word styles and outline levels, bold text, indentation levels and numbering. At the end of the process, each set of paragraphs surrounded by a rounded blue rectangle will be converted into an individual clause. 

However, there will often be situations where you want to rearrange the structure proposed by ClauseBuddy, e.g. because the software did not properly recognise the original structure, or because you want your clause library to have smaller sub-clauses instead of one large clause. Reconfiguring is very easy, using either the buttons in the toolbar or using the keyboard.

Start by selecting one or more paragraphs. You can do so:

• by clicking with your mouse on a single paragraph
• by dragging with your mouse over multiple paragraphs at once
• by holding Shift and pressing the up/down arrows on your keyboard, to extend an existing selection upward or downward

Once selected, you can change the position of paragraphs:

• By clicking on the left and right buttons in the toolbar, to increase/decrease their indentation.
• By pressing the left/right arrow buttons on your keyboard.

You can delete selected paragraphs by pressing the delete button in the toolbar, or by pressing the Delete button on your keyboard. You can un-delete by pressing the button again. Deleted paragraphs will be colored red, and will not be included in the resulting clause.

You can add paragraphs to your auto-stack by clicking on the stack button in the toolbar, or by pressing Enter on your keyboard. Once selected, a paragraph will be shown with a left green border, as an indication that that paragraph will be included in the auto-creation of folders described below.

Note that the entire paragraph structure will be selected, even when only one sub-paragraph inside would have been selected.

You can remove a paragraph from your auto-stack by clicking again on the stack button in the toolbar.

You can filter paragraphs by entering one or more words in the Filter box in the upper-right corner. In addition, you can use the popup-menu to toggle the visibility of classes of paragraphs.

Detecting (near) duplicate clauses

When you import a document, ClauseBuddy will not only automatically match each paragraph and each paragraph set with all the other paragraphs within the same session, but also with all the existing clauses in your clause library. This will allow you to immediately identify clauses that are identical or highly similar to each other. 

Each time you change the structure of a paragraph set and/or the contents of converted clauses, the software will reperform the calculation, in order to maximally support you in avoiding duplicates. 

For example, in the screenshot below you can see that the first paragraph happens to be (nearly) identical to other content. This is depicted by the pink duplicate button.

When you then click the duplicate button, the software will show a comparison between the paragraph and the (nearly) identical other paragraphs it found. You can see that this paragraphs is indeed quite identical to a paragraph within another document of the session:

Conversely, in the following screenshot, both the individual paragraphs and the entire paragraph set happens to be a (near) duplicate. The software will then show a pink banner at the top:

Be aware that the near-duplicate detection has several built-in limitations. For example, paragraphs with less than 8 significant words will be ignored in the comparison, to avoid that short paragraphs (particularly titles) would unnecessarily result in matches. Similarly, due to the statistical optimisations performed by the software (duplication detections among hundreds of paragraphs easily results in more than one million comparisons) there may be small discrepancies between the duplicates detected when you load a session, add a document and reconfigure a clause.