Bulk Operations
Last updated
Last updated
The Bulk Operations module allows you to perform multiple operations simultaneously across one or more Word-files or PDF-files. This means that you can let ClauseBuddy handle tedious editing tasks that would otherwise require many multiple mouse clicks — or even multiple hours.
The Bulk Operations module seems quite simple, but has many different use cases. To whet your appetite, here are some examples of what you can achieve in less than 20 seconds with ClauseBuddy, that would other take you many minutes:
Bundling eight different DOCX-files together into one single DOCX-file.
Bundling those same eight documents into a single PDF-file, preceded by a nice graphical PDF-cover document prepared by your firm's graphical department.
Creating a table with all 635 paragraphs (across 23 long documents) that contain certain keywords — e.g., the name of the entities in the company group.
Updating the same paragraph with some payment term across twenty different templates.
Making sure that, across a large set of documents that have been reviewed by many different lawyers, all the track changes refer to the same "author" (instead of having each lawyer's own name listed).
Replacing all yellow placeholders with commencement date into 23rd April 2025, signature location to Paris and vendor signatory to John LeCarré. Across ten different files.
Within fifteen different annexes, accepting all track changes, removing metadata, and making sure that all footers say "Execution Copy" instead of "For discussion purposes only".
Across all documents, removing the unnecessary consecutive spaces and empty paragraphs, and making sure the MS Word styles are synchronised.
When you start the Bulk Operations module, you'll notice that there are three different steps to be undertaken:
Selecting the document(s) you want to include in the processing.
Selecting the operation(s) you want to include.
Executing the operations
In the first step, you have to select which documents you want to include in the processing operations. For example, you may want to replace yellow placeholders across twenty documents at the same time.
To add documents, drag them on the Upload area in the upper-left corner, or click on that area and use the Windows/Mac file selection dialog box to navigate to the relevant files.
If you're using ClauseBuddy inside of MS Word, then by default your currently opened document will be included, as shown in the screenshot above. If you removed this document from the list, you can re-add it by clicking on the button that appears:
When you add PDF-files, ClauseBuddy will immediately convert them into DOCX-files. The reason is that most of the processing operations work on DOCX-files only, even though the end result can usually be exported to a PDF-file.
As discussed below, some processing operations — e.g., append or prepend documents — do allow you to add PDF-files as such, without any conversion taking place.
You can reorder files by using the up & down buttons. The order of the files is not relevant for all types of processing operations (e.g., when you would replace headers & footers in twenty files and download the resulting files as a ZIP, the internal order is irrelevant).
ClauseBuddy will apply zero, one or more operations to all your selected documents.
The operations will be executed sequentially, for all documents, in the order those documents were listed in the first step.
In most cases you will select one, two or three different operations — but in theory the number of operations is unlimited.
If you merely want to bundle all files into one single DOCX-document or PDF-file, then don't add any operations at all. Skip this second step, immediately go to the third step (Execute) and export to a single DOCX-document or PDF-file.
The easiest way to select certain operations, is by choosing a pre-existing set that was prepared by yourself or your colleagues.
Simply click on a box with a predefined set to load it into ClauseBuddy. You can then decide to either take that predefined set as-is, or to modify it to suit your needs.
When you check the Append to existing operations checkbox (only visible when at least one operation already exists), the predefined set is appended to your existing operations, instead of replacing them. This allows you to concatenate multiple existing operation-sets.
Instead, you can also create your own set of operations by clicking on the green Create your own set... at the top. You will then be taken to the next screen, where you can add, rearrange and customise each of the operations.
You add a new operation by clicking on the green Add operation button, and selecting one of the many options. Click on the question mark icon to get some more information on what the operation performs.
Each operation is different. Some have many settings that can be tweaked, others have no settings at all. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that Extract definitions has no settings to configure, while Remove empty paragraphs has one setting, and Find & replace text has many different settings.
Operations fall into two general categories: some perform extractions (e.g., extract all paragraphs containing certain keywords, or extract the digital fingerprint of the file), while others perform modifications (e.g., changing headers or accepting track changes).
You can remove an operation by clicking on the cross-icon at the right.
You can change the order of operations by clicking on the up & down arrows; this will affect in which order the operations will be executed by ClauseBuddy. Only for some operations the ordering is relevant — for example, you may want to first delete certain paragraphs containing product name X, and only then extract all the paragraphs that contain product name Y. Or you may want to first have a Replace placeholders operation and only then a Proofreading operation, otherwise the leftover placeholders will trigger various proofreading-warnings.
As the final step, you must instruct ClauseBuddy to execute the operations across the selected documents. Depending on the amount of documents and the type of processing operations, ClauseBuddy allows you to choose from different export formats:
The Single file options will only be available when either you have selected multiple documents in the first step (because you can then bundle all of them into one DOCX or PDF), or when you have at least one operation that performs a modification of the document.
The Replace currently opened document option will only be available when you are using ClauseBuddy inside of MS Word. Executing this option will completely replace the content of your currently opened document.
You should be aware that some technical limitations apply which cause the Replace currently opened document to not always be possible (e.g., when changing the protection level). Also, when combining multiple documents into one, this option will not always cause nice page breaks to happen.
The Separate files (ZIP) option will only be available when you have selected multiple documents in the first step and you simultaneously have at least one operation that performs a modification of the document.
The Table export options will only be available when you have included at least one operation that performs an extraction.
All other options are non-destructive, i.e. they don't affect the original files. They merely result in one or more copies of the files or information that you selected in the first step.
This operation performs a proofreading of the submitted DOCX-files.
It is the equivalent of manually opening each of your DOCX-files in MS Word, opening ClauseBuddy and going to the Proofreading module of ClauseBuddy in order to see whether there are missing definitions, irrelevant definitions, hardcoded numbers, etc.
The output is a table in MS Word or Excel that is roughly equivalent to what you would see inside the Proofreading module, except for the obvious interactivity, i.e. the ability to click on an issue in ClauseBuddy and then go to the corresponding problematic paragraph.
The target audience of this operation obviously consists of transaction-oriented lawyers who have to frequently perform proofreadings across many different files.
This operation automatically removes consecutive spaces.
You would be surprised how many double (or triple, or quadruple...) spaces sneak into an MS Word document over time. These unnecessary spaces not only cause ugly small "holes" to appear in the layout, but can also interfere in subtle ways with MS Word's layout engine.
ClauseBuddy automatically removes all those spaces in one go.
This operation automatically removes empty paragraphs.
For example, in the example below (with the hidden symbols activated) you can see that there's an empty paragraph in between the two clauses. When this operation is executed, ClauseBuddy will automatically remove those empty paragraphs.
As explained in our MS Word tutorial, adding empty paragraphs (typically by pressing Enter twice) goes against the philosophy of MS Word, and will cause all kinds of text flow issues. Instead, one should use the Space before and Space after options in a paragraph settings, ideally stored in MS Word styles.
When cleaning documents with bad layout, it often happens that those empty paragraphs remain throughout the document. This can be fixed with this operation.
The alternative is to search for ^p^p within MS Word's Advanced Find & Replace dialog box, and replace it by ^p. You may have execute that operation multiple times in order to remove all empty paragraphs. Due to the fact that these symbols look scary and are unknown to most legal professionals, we've included this operation in ClauseBuddy.
This operation removes manually inserted ("hardcoded") numbers from the beginning of paragraphs.
For example, in the following screenshot, you can see that the 5.1 was manually typed in (when you would position your cursor on the number, it will not be shown with a light grey background).
When this operation is executed, ClauseBuddy will automatically remove such number, and any subsequent space:
This operation will only target numbers — bullets will remain unaffected.
This operation will not target numbers within headers, footers and footnotes.
This operation primarily removes all the "metadata" from a DOCX file.
This operations is the equivalent of what you can manually each within MS Word by clicking several layers deep, so the main benefit of this operation is that it saves you some clicks (particularly if you create a predefined set of operations for your colleagues), and particularly that you can perform this in bulk across many different files.
You can also enable the Remove personal information on save option. This causes MS Word to automatically remove any personal information from the DOCX-file upon each save.
"Metadata" consists of several types of information stored within a DOCX-file, such as the author, manager, company, template being used, storage location. In fact, you can even store any amount of custom data in a file.
Because metadata is hidden fairly deeply inside a DOCX-file, companies can inadvertently expose (semi)confidential information to outside parties. Unremoved metadata can also lead to embarrassing situations, e.g. when it is revealed that prestigious law firm X actually used a template from competitor Y...
To see the metadata in MS Word for Windows, you have to go to the File tab in the ribbon, subsection Info.
When you click on Advanced Properties in the top-right corner, you can see all information:
To remove the metadata manually, you have to click on the Inspect Document option in the Info panel of MS Word for Windows.
In the dialog box that appears, you must then click on Inspect at the bottom, and then finally click on Remove all.
The Remove personal information on save option can be found in a completely different location: under File > Options, Trust Center > Trust Center Settings, then Privacy Options:
Because all of this is buried very deeply, it's self-evident why most legal professional don't realise the metadata issue. Or why there exists a cottage-industry of dedicated software applications that remove this automatically (e.g., when you're sending out emails).
ClauseBuddy can offer an interesting alternative here, that goes beyond these applications by allowing you to perform this in bulk.
This option is simple to use in practice: it calculates the digital fingerprint of all the DOCX-files you uploaded, as well as any other files (of any type) that you would upload in this operation's upload-area.
It then exports all of them to a table in MS Word or Excel.
You can then include these fingerprints (a bunch of seemingly nonsensical numbers & letters) in, for example, a signed contract — e.g. preceded by the following language:
"The Parties agree to incorporate a list of technical schedules as part of this agreement. Due to their size and technical nature, these files are not physically printed and attached. Instead, each Party will hold a copy of those files. The SHA-256 hash of each file is set forth in the following table: ..."
Obviously, all this digital fingerprinting requires quite some explanation to understand, because it will be unfamiliar territory for most lawyers.
Imagine that you're in the typical situation where you have negotiated a large contract that contains many different schedules, with hundreds or even thousands of pages. For reasons of legal certainty you would be inclined to print all pages and have them signed, but this would be cumbersome and time-consuming; furthermore, some types of documents (e.g., huge Excel-files) are not easily printable. Even e-signing won't work if you have to deal with huge files, a large number of documents, or documents that cannot be easily converted to PDF.
There are of course commercial data stores available where you can store files, but both parties have to trust this, the cost must be covered, for long-running contracts it must be guaranteed that the vendor will stay around for many years, etc.
The easiest way to deal with this, while ensuring that everything remains legally sound and tamper-proof, is to calculate a digital fingerprint of each schedule, and then include all those digital fingerprints in the main contract. That's exactly what ClauseBuddy offers with this operation.
The fingerprint is technically called a "hash" — more specifically, a SHA-256 hash, which is a secure and commonly used digital fingerprinting technique that every IT-expert will be familiar with. It is mathematically guaranteed that the hash / digital fingerprint will change completely when even a single letter would be modified in the file.
All this hashing sounds fancy, but is really basic technology that has been around for many years, even though this probably feels like science-fiction for lawyers. If you want to learn more about this, check out videos such as https://lnkd.in/edeaPRhk or introduction texts like https://lnkd.in/e-aKb8Uq
Both parties can then print/e-sign just the main body of the contract containing the hash, and store the files on their own systems. Due to the technical guarantees of the hashing algorithm, each party can rest assured that the other party cannot secretly change something in the files. When you would suspect this behaviour from your counterparty, you can run the same command again (using ClauseBuddy or any of the many technical tools available to IT-experts) and a different hash would be generated.
The end-result is a mathematically sound, low-tech solution to the contract signature process.
See our LinkedIn post that contains a video of how to calculate a hash in Windows without ClauseBuddy. The gist of it is that you run the following commands:
In Windows, using the command prompt: certutil -hashfile filename.docx SHA256
On a Mac or Linux machine, using the terminal: shasum -a 256 filename.docx
This operation has no options to configure.
When executed, it then creates for each of the uploaded documents:
an alphabetically ordered table with all definitions found in the definition list(s)
an alphabetically ordered table with all the "inline" definitions, i.e. within the body of a clause — e.g. the typical "... (hereinafter called "xxx") ...".
These tables can then be shown on the screen, in Excel or in MS Word.
This operation allows you to get an exhaustive overview of all definitions found in a set of documents. It avoids that you have to manually compile all those definitions.
This operation is the equivalent of the Definitions module on ClauseBuddy's homepage.
This operation is somewhat similar to the Proofreading operation, but is limited to definitions.
This operation allows you to find one or more specific keywords and then extract the surrounding text, across entire documents. You can, for example get an overview table of:
all paragraphs in a witness statement where a certain witness' name is mentioned
all clauses that mention "force majeure", across a bundle of documents received from a client
upload a PDF file that contains frequent mentions of a certain legal entity, and extract all those fragments into an Excel file
You can add one or more "targets" (i.e. keywords of literal phrases that you want to search on), by clicking on the green plus-button. For example, when you want to search for paragraphs containing either liability, or damage, or compensation, you would use the following settings:
This would for example result in the following table in MS Word
When you check Case sensitive, ClauseBuddy will only take into account paragraphs that have exactly the same capitalisation in their text — e.g., when searching for Liability with an initial capital, words like liability in lowercase will not be found.
When you check Find whole words only, ClauseBuddy will ignore matches on part of a word. For example, when you search for confidential and this options is not checked, then words like confidentiality will also be found, which may not always be what you want.
The options at the bottom allow you to configure what exactly is being extracted:
Extract paragraph will extract each paragraph in which one or more matching targets are found.
Extract clause will extract the entire clause or subsection — i.e. a title and one or more paragraph— from the document. This will result in much longer fragments than Extract paragraph.
Extract fragment will extract a few hundred characters surrounding the target text.
The Extract fragment option is particularly useful if you're dealing with files that have a bad layout, e.g. with paragraphs that have unnecessary line-endings. This is often the case with converted PDF-files. For example, the following document (converted from a PDF-file) looks OK when you're opening it...
ClauseBuddy will fail to extract any text in such situation, because Extract paragraph and Extract clause work on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, so will never see "obligations" and "hereunder" next to each other.
Conversely, Extract fragment can see "across" paragraph endings; the downside is that its output does not nicely start at, or end at, paragraph boundaries.
This operation allows you to perform a bulk find & replace operation, simultaneously across multiple documents, for multiple words at once. For example, you may want to replace the name of the signatories across multiple files at once, or remove all mentions of "(to be confirmed)".
By default you are replacing text, e.g. in the screenshot every instance of "Agreement" will be replaced by "Contract". However, you can also delete or highlight found text, by changing the grey buttons:
The other options are somewhat similar to other find & replace dialog boxes:
Case sensitive allows you to restrict searches to text that exactly matches capitalisation — so searching for "Party" will not find a lowercase "party" in your documents.
Find whole words only allows you to searches to entire words — so that searching for "confidential" will not found words like "confidentiality". You'll likely only want to use this when searching for a single word.
When Track changes is checked, all changes will be shown with changes.
When you would like to perform some find & replace options with different settings than others (e.g., search for "Agreement" with case-sensitivity turned on, but search for "party" without case-sensitivity), then simply add a second Find & Replace operation where you configure the settings differently.
Find & replace also searches within headers, footers & footnotes.
The Replace footers operations add, replace or delete headers or footers. For example, when preparing documents for signature, you may want to replace all footers that still say "Non-binding, for discussion purposes only" by "Execution copy"; similarly, you may want to add that same footer to documents that do not yet have a footer.
By checking Only replace if the following text is present you can limit the replacements to footers that contain the specified text. For example, when your documents contain multiple types of footers and you only want to replace the footers that contain "Non-binding", then fill in that wording. Note that this search is performed without case-sensitivity.
Add header/footer to sections that currently have no header/footer allows you to add footers to those parts of the document that do not yet have a header/footer. If this options is not checked, then those sections of the document will be left untouched by this operation.
Through the grey button next to Action, you can configure what should be done with headers/footers that are within scope.
By default, New footer is selected, which will insert a new footer that contains the text in the three boxes below it. Those three boxes can be independently filled with text.
You can also insert a page-number and the total number of pages, by putting those around curly braces (as demonstrated in the screenshot).
Technically, the center part is centered through a centered tab, while the right part is right-aligned by virtue of a right tab. From an MS Word perspective this is the cleanest approach, but it has the downsides of
breaking down when there's too much text in one of the parts
not allowing for multiple lines of text
In both cases, you'll likely want to use Copy footer instead, because that option gives you fine-grained control over the replacement footer.
When instead you choose Copy footer from other document, you're invited to upload a document from which you can copy the footer. When you then click on the Footer: dialog box, you can choose which of the footer(s) present in the uploaded document you want to use.
Many law firms show a logo and/or a list of lawyers as background. Technically this is done by adding graphics to headers & footers. In other words, the Replace footers operation can also be used to copy such backgrounds from one document to the next.
Finally, when you would select Delete as the Action, all footers within the scope will get deleted. If you specified no text for Only replace if the following text is present, this effectively means that you would delete all footers in your documents.
This operation allows you to search for a paragraph/clause and then delete or replace it.
This may sound like a traditional search & replace operation, but it's actually much — much — more powerful, because it allows you to do the following:
If you have a set of templates that contain diverging force majeure clauses, then you can replace all those clauses at once, across all your templates.
You can replace the title paragraph "Liability" to "Risk allocation" across 20 documents at once.
In the document you're currently working in inside MS Word, you can remove all paragraphs that contain "[TBC]".
Similar to other operations, Track changes will register all changes as mark-up when checked.
Search text allows for entirely different options:
The default option Partial match of paragraph will find paragraphs that somewhere contain the text you enter. Each paragraph that contains that specific text will then be targeted.
The option Complete match of paragraph will find paragraphs that contain just the text that you enter. Accordingly, every paragraph that contains exactly this text — nothing more, nothing less — will be targeted.
The option Partial match of clause will find clauses that somewhere contain the text you enter within one of their paragraphs.
Note that for all options, the search is performed case-insensitively and that automatic numbering is ignored. Multiple spaces are ignored.
The Partial match of clause is probably the most powerful option, but also the one that you must treat most carefully. For example, assume you want to target the following clause, e.g. to replace it entirely, or to delete it:
You would be able to target it by for example searching for "exclusive, transferable, sublicenseable" — assuming that text (including the punctuation) is found in all your documents.
However, you must understand that what constitutes a "clause" is quite ambiguous, and that the process of splitting documents into clauses is not perfect; particularly for documents with bad layout, no proper use of MS Word styles and no automatic numbering ClauseBuddy may be misled during the clause splitting process. Generally speaking, ClauseBuddy will treat as a clause the collection of some title (typically in bold, capitals, etc.) with the paragraphs below it, until a subsequent title.
ClauseBuddy provides the following setting in Replace with:
Formatted text (for obvious reasons only available when using ClauseBuddy inside of MS Word) allows you to replace the target paragraph/clause with one or more paragraphs from your currently opened document. Just select the text and click on the blue Use selection button. If possible, prefer this over the Unformatted text option, because it allows you to use MS Word styles (thus preserving formatting) and also allows to insert cross-references, bookmarks, etc. Nevertheless, bear in mind that cross-references and bookmarks will only properly "survive" in each target document when the original target document contains the same paragraphs that the cross-references/bookmarks point to. Basically you can assume that they will survive when a manual copy/paste also works correctly for your target documents.
The Unformatted text is the simplest option: it allows you to insert one or more paragraphs with plain text. Keep in mind that all layout will be gone with this option, so you'll probably only want to use it when replacing a single, simple target paragraph.
The Delete option will delete the target paragraphs/clauses.
The Highlight option will highlight the target paragraphs/clauses in yellow.
If you are targeting clauses or paragraphs across multiple documents, then make sure that you enter several words that together uniquely identify those clauses / paragraphs. If it's not possible to find a common set of words, you may want to perform the entire bulk operation in multiple passes with multiple documents, or alternatively add multiple Replace or delete paragraphs/clauses in a row, each with different words.
Be careful careful with changing
This operation is identical to Replace footers, but targets headers instead.
This operation allows you to extract all placeholders from the documents in your list, i.e. text between square brackets or highlighted in yellow.
The use case of this operation is that it provides you with an overview of all placeholders/highlights, and then allows you to perform relevant replacements. This operation is therefore similar to the Find & Replace operation, but makes things a bit easier for your by automatically extracting all placeholders & highlights when you press the blue Extract placeholders from selected documents button.
When Track changes is enabled, all replacements & deletions performed by ClauseBuddy will be marked as changes.
When you choose Replace, the placeholder/highlighted text (including any square brackets around it) will be replaced by the text you provided. If the placeholder was highlighted, then the highlight will be removed.
When you choose Delete, the placeholder/highlighted text will simply be deleted instead.
You can click on the eye-icon to get an exhaustive overview of all the paragraphs where the placeholder was found, in any of the documents.
This operation allows you to add several kinds of protection to all your DOCX-files at once.
This operation is the equivalent of manually adding these protections in MS Word for each of the documents in your list. Given that most legal professionals are unaware of even their existence, the use case is therefore also to make things easier for ClauseBuddy-users.
Most likely you will want to export the resulting files as a .ZIP file in step 3.
Add watermark allows you to add a watermark (i.e., big grey text) to the background of each page, and to avoid that recipients of your DOCX-file can change the document without the password.
Allow only comments disallows any changes, other than comments. Bear in mind that you will probably annoy other legal professionals when this protection is active, as the Word-file then becomes reasonably similar to an uneditable PDF-file.
Allow only revisions automatically enables track changes, so that any change made by another user will automatically be visible when you get back the document. This setting avoids that users can sneakily insert changes into a document, i.e. without those changes showing up.
Read-only disallows any type of change.
Allow only forms only allows other users to fill in any forms that exist in the document (i.e., dropdown boxes, edit boxes, etc. For a quick overview, see for example https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/word-tips/how-to-create-forms-in-word/1/
This operation allows you to copy the paragraph-styles of a certain DOCX-file towards all uploaded DOCX-files.
Most likely you will want to export the resulting files as a .ZIP file in step 3.
The use case of this operation is if you are updating your existing templates, e.g. because your house style changed. MS Word allows you to use automatically updating templates (but hardly any legal professional knows how this works) and also allows manual synchronisation of styles (but this is deeply buried inside of MS Word's dialog boxes, and takes quite some mouseclicks to perform, so this easily takes a minute per document).
In the Copy from box, you need to select the DOCX-file (or choose your currently opened Word-document) from which you want to copy the styles towards all the documents you've selected in Step 1.
At Styles to copy you can then choose either All (to copy all styles)...
... or choose Selected and then choose one or more styles from the file you selected, by clicking on the green + button. ClauseBuddy will extract the list of all paragraph-styles from that document.
When you don't check Overwrite existing styles, ClauseBuddy will not copy a style if the styles already exists in a target document. Usually you will want to enable this option, because usually you will be using this operation to synchronise styles.
This operation allows you to append a PDF-file or DOCX-document at the end of the list of documents (append) or at the front (prepend).
Most likely you will want to export the resulting files as a single DOCX or PDF-file in step 3. If you export as a ZIP, you'd simply get a ZIP with all your documents in there (which has little value, except when you would also have included other operations).
Your graphical designer has prepared a nicely-looking PDF-file that you can include as a cover-sheet for client pitching. As a legal professional you obviously prepare the content of the pitch in an MS Word-file (perhaps even automatically generated with Clause9 or ClauseBuddy's Smart Templates), but it's not possible to include a PDF-file as such as the first page of your document. If you are technically savvy, you may know how to convert the PDF-file to a bitmapped graphic (e.g., a PNG or JPG), and then include that graphic in the MS Word-file, but that would easily blow up the size of the Word-file to several megabytes. ClauseBuddy avoids all this hassle, by allowing you to concentrate on your Word-file and attaching the cover-PDF through a Bulk Operation.
When concluding contracts for a certain line of business (e.g., selling products), you may have one or more static technical annexes (DOCX or PDF) that must be attached at the end. ClauseBuddy can attach those documents for you, so you don't have to include them in the Word-file itself.
When concluding contracts, you may want to attach your terms & conditions. Through this bulk operation, ClauseBuddy can do this automatically for you, which is often better than physically embedding those terms & conditions into your Word-file, because:
physically embedding them requires some skill, as the styling is often different than the rest of the document (e.g., requires a separate section in two columns, with a different font, etc.)
you often deliberately don't want to include the text of the terms & conditions, as this would "invite" your counterparty to start making changes.
The only setting you must configure is selecting the right document that you want append/prepend:
You can either select a PDF-file or a DOCX-file.
Notes:
When selecting a PDF-file, you will not be allowed to export to a DOCX-file in Step 3; i.e. unlike PDF-documents you would upload in Step 1, ClauseBuddy deliberately will not convert the PDF-file to DOCX — which you probably don't want anyway because the conversion will deteriorate the layout, while your coversheet or appended document is likely graphically rich.
When you would select multiple files at once, additional append/prepend operations will be added, one for each file being uploaded.
You may be wondering about the difference between uploading a cover document as part of the documents-list in Step 1, or instead as part of a Prepend Document operation. After all, when you would export as a "Single file" in Step 3, you're bundling documents anyway.
When you select a document in Step 1, it will be processed by all the operations you include. Conversely, a document uploaded in Step 3 will not get processed in any way — it will be attached as-is.
When you select a PDF-file in Step 1, it will be converted to a DOCX-file and treated as a DOCX-file by all the operations you include.
Documents you include in Step 1 will not be included in a saved operations-set (e.g., to make it available to your colleagues). Conversely, documents included in Append/Prepend documents in Step 2, will be included when saving.
This operation allows you to accept all "track changes" in each of the documents you uploaded in Step 1. The use case of this operation is typically in the context of finalising a set of documents, e.g. when making them ready for signing.
You will likely want to export the result to a .ZIP file in Step 3. Exporting to a single PDF-file or DOCX-document is possible, but will result in a huge file in which all of the indidivual bilateral comparisons are concatenated, one after the other.
When you check Delete all comments, all comments that were included (of every party) will get deleted. When this setting is not activated, any comments will be left untouched.
When you check Stop tracking changes, any changes made by a user when opening the resulting document, will not be marked as changes. In other words, this is similar to disabling the Track changes button in the Review tab of MS Word.
This operation allows you to compare each of the documents you uploaded in Step 1 with a single document.
The typical use case of this operation is to compare a multitude of highly similar documents — e.g., your template sales agreement and fifty negotiated copies of it, in order to find "hot zones" of changes that are frequently requested by customers.
You may want to check out the Bulk Compare module, which has identical use cases. The difference is that this operation (i.e., the operation within Bulk Operations) performs a two-way comparison between your model document and each of the variations, while the Bulk Compare module instead performs a single comparison ("integrating" all changes into one). In other words: when you're comparing 50 negotiated copies of your T&C template, then this will result in 50 files with changes within this Bulk Operations module, while the Bulk Compare module would instead show a single document in which each of the changes is shown in an integrated way.
The single most important setting is the document you upload, called the "Base document". In the use cases described above, this base document will for example be your template T&C or your model sales agreement.
The settings are very similar to the settings in the Bulk Compare module.
Ignore formatting avoids that mere formatting changes (e.g., words being made bold in one document but not the other) will be ignored.
Ignore case changes avoids that capitalisation changes (e.g., Confidentiality versus confidentiality) would be marked as changes.
Ignore headers & footers avoids that changes within headers & footers would be included.
Ignore tables, when checked, will skip tables during the comparison.
This operation is similar to the Accept all changes operation, but rejects instead of accepts all changes.
This operation allows you to change all the authors, of all the "track changes", to a single author.
The typical use case is to resolve a situation where a single DOCX-file has gone through the hands of multiple legal professionals, who all have made changes (e.g., a junior lawyer, a senior lawyer and the partner all have added some comments), and you want to avoid that the customer/client/counterparty would notice this. Instead, you want the customer/client/counterparty to see a single name appear in the track changes (e.g., the name of the partner).
The only setting you can activate, is whether to also change the author of the comments. If so, then all the comments will appear to have been made by this same person (John Smith in the screenshot above).
Most likely you will want to export the resulting files as a .ZIP file in step 3.
... but when you try to search for "obligations hereunder", you will get no results when using Extract paragraph or Extract clause. The reason is that under-the-hood, the clause actually consists of five different paragraphs. You can see this when turning on the hidden symbols button in Word :
