Applying changes
Applying changes one by one
When you click on the Apply changes button, Bracketeer will apply the changes of the currently visible paragraphs to the opened MS Word document. If you are not happy with the result, you can undo your changes inside of the DOCX file by clicking on MS Word's undo button (or pressing the Ctrl-Z keyboard shorcut).
This seems easy enough, but you should be aware of a few limitations:
A first limitation is that Bracketeer assumes that you have not modified the paragraph in the DOCX-file. If you did, unexpected results will happen.
Instead, when you have changed a paragraph in the DOCX-file, you need to hit the Refresh button at the top of the screen. You should, however, be aware that this may remove some changes you have made inside of Bracketeer.
When Bracketeer loads your DOCX-file, it associates each paragraph in the DOCX file with its own internal representation of that paragraph. When you then apply changes, various technical limitations inside of MS Word will cause that in-memory association to be gone, even when you would Undo your changes in the DOCX-file. While Bracketeer will nevertheless try to manually find back your paragraph, it may sometimes fail in doing so, e.g. when the paragraph was modified in the meantime, or when an identical paragraph exists at an earlier location in the DOCX-file.
You can Shift-click on the Apply changes button to apply the changes and move to the next section with square brackets / highlight. This way, you can click your way through the entire DOCX-file.
Applying changes in bulk
Instead of applying changes one by one, you can also apply changes in bulk, by clicking on the triangle next to Apply changes and choosing:
Apply to entire document to apply all changes to the current DOCX file. Note that also here, Bracketeer assumes that you have not made changes in the DOCX-file to the paragraphs that you were modifying inside of Bracketeer.
Apply to a new document to apply all changes to a copy of the initial DOCX file. In this case, Bracketeer will apply all your modifications to a copy of the DOCX-file that was initially loaded by it, and then open the result in a new window inside of MS Word. So even if you would have made changes to the DOCX-file in the meantime, these changes would be ignored.
Configuring how changes are applied
In the dropdown menu next to Apply changes, Bracketeer allows you to specify two options:
Remove highlights will always remove the yellow highlighting within target paragraphs when changes are applied, even when those text fragments were outside any selected option or alternative. (Note that yellow highlights will always be removed when a text fragment was inside an option or alternative.)
Remove footnotes will automatically remove footnotes within target paragraphs. This can be interesting to deal with template documents that contain legal comments or hints within footnotes, which is a common practice in some law firms. Typically, such footnotes must not end up in the resulting contract, which is why Bracketeer will remove footnotes by default.
Resetting
When you're no longer happy with the changes you've made to the currently visible set of paragraphs, you can choose the Discard changes option. The visible paragraphs will then return to their original state.
When you want to reset all paragraphs across the entire document — i.e., not only those currently visible in Bracketeer — then Shift-click on the Reset entirely option.
Last updated