Smart placeholders

ClauseBuddy allows you to insert simple placeholders using the toolbar.

In their simplest form, these placeholders will turn up as text with a yellow background within your MS Word document.

But that's only the beginning. Read on for all the options you can play with!

Filling & configuring placeholders

Instead of simply inserting a clause into your MS Word document, you can also configure it by choosing the Configure clause option of the dropdown-menu:

You are then taken to a separate dialog box, where the placeholders are grouped together, either at the bottom of the window (when there's not a lot of horizontal space), or at the right (when ClauseBuddy has sufficient horizontal space):

You can then click on a placeholder to enter a value. You will notice that the placeholder gets replaced by the value you choose. Click on the trash-can icon to remove the assigned value again.

Using multiple instances of a placeholder

Anywhere you use exactly the same placeholder in your clause, it will be replaced by the same assigned value. This is one of the most powerful features of the placeholders, as the placeholders will then act as a kind of super-fast "find & replace".

For example, suppose you have the following clause:

When you then configure this clause, you will notice that only three placeholders are shown in the placeholders-panel:

When you fill in any of those placeholders, you will notice that all of the instances of that placeholder will be immediately replaced by the text you typed in. For example:

Using predefined options

If you frequently assign the same text to the same placeholders, you may want to consider adding those texts in the placeholder itself. You can do so by putting a pipe-symbol (vertical line) between the various options. For example, when you use

Then ClauseBase will show you the following options in a dropdown-menu:

You can then simply click on "Mr." or "Mrs." to choose that predefined option, or alternatively type in some custom text in the box at the bottom.

You can even use two level of options, by inserting sub-options within square brackets after the name of your main category. For example:

... will then be presented with submenus, as follows:

Remembering options

ClauseBuddy will remember the values you assign to each placeholder. Once you assign some text to a placeholder in one clause, it will automatically show up in other clauses that use the same placeholder.

ClauseBuddy will not only remember the value while it is loaded on your screen, but will also store that value in the "properties" (metadata) of your DOCX-file. This means that next time you open the document, it will remember the texts you assigned to the placeholders.

This metadata is encrypted, so that recipients of your document will not be able to know which values you assigned to your placeholders, even if they also use the very same placeholders within their version of ClauseBuddy. Only colleagues within the same customer-account will be able to see each other's metadata. (If this is even not strict enough, you can request ClauseBase to configure your server differently.)

Be aware that some "metadata-scrubbers" will deliberately remove the metadata from DOCX-files. Many law firms use standard tools that remove such data before, for example, sending out emails to third parties. Be aware that this will make ClauseBuddy "forget" the assigned texts next time you would open the DOCX-file and inspect a clause.

Configuring the style of the placeholder

Under the hood, ClauseBuddy relies on the powerful Clause9 drafting engine, which allows many types of customisations. If you have access to Clause9 (or can involve someone who has access), then you can configure the placeholder to have a different background-color and/or use a different style of placeholder when inserted. (It will still show with a yellow background, but once inserted into your MS Word document, it will look differently.)

As always with Clause9, the custom styling configuration can be applied to all the users (customer-wide), or per group, or even per user.

Have a look at the available options on how you can stylize the placeholder:

And all colours are at your disposal:

Hungry for more?

If you want even more automation, then you probably want to turn to document automation, using the Smart Templates feature of ClauseBuddy. And if that's not enough, you can also use the enormous power of Clause9 to create highly dynamic, multi-lingual clauses. Those clauses will then be available right from within your clause library in ClauseBuddy, ready to be customised and inserted into your MS Word documents.