Inserting clauses

Once you have found a clause, you can insert it into your Word document (i.e. the left side of your Word window), by clicking on the + button.

Tweaking a clause before insertion

When you click on the big plus-icon (+) in the left corner of a clause, a dialog box appears where you can configure this clause's content and appearance. You can, for example, hide the clause's title (useful when you don't need a subtitle to be inserted), remove the numbering of the clause, remove any footnotes and tweak formatting.

Filling placeholders

ClauseBuddy allows you to fill placeholders — i.e. text marked as yellow in ClauseBuddy's editor — right from within ClauseBuddy, before you insert the clause into your MS Word document. Simply click on the relevant placeholder, and fill in the value you want.

Tweaking formatting

Numbering and styling in MS Word are terra incognita for many legal professionals, so that we all have to live in a world where there are much more poorly formatted documents then properly formatted documents. ClauseBuddy cannot solve this problem, but allows you to define how the clause should be inserted into a document:

• With Minimal styling, ClauseBuddy will assign standard styles to clauses, and only indent them somewhat to ensure you still see the structure of the original paragraphs. This is the default option, which is recommended if your target document is ... ahem.. a chaotic mess in terms of layout.

• With Guess styling, ClauseBuddy will try to mimic the styling of your target document, through an educated guess. Use this option if your target document is reasonably structured, and none of the following options are available to you.

• All the following options in the dropdown list are intended to reflect a certain house style. At least one option ("ClauseBase", for documents generated with it) will be available, but you can also define your own house style. While you should be very familiar with styles in MS Word — knowledge typically reserved for a few people in an organisation — it does allow you to insert clauses that are virtually guaranteed to have correct styling. When you then open a template for which a house style was pre-configured in ClauseBuddy, the relevant style scheme will be automatically selected by ClauseBuddy.

Tips

• When you insert your clause, you may see your screen quickly flash and restructure the text at the left side. The reason is that ClauseBuddy inserts an initially numbered clause, and subsequently tries to fit the numbering and styling to the surrounding clauses. Thanks to this two-step process, you can always try to hit undo (Ctrl-Z) once in MS Word to check whether you actually want to keep the initially inserted version. Hit undo again to remove the clause alltogether.