Binder pane in the operations panel
Last updated
Last updated
Instead of the “document” button in the operations panel, binders will replace this with a “binder” button, which looks like this when opening a new, empty binder:
In this menu, you can insert new or existing documents, rearrange their order and provide them with short titles for easy referencing (e.g.: “Annex 1” or “Pricing Schedule”).
Uploading an existing document lets you choose a document from your library to insert into the binder. Inserting a new document occurs in exactly the same way as you would create a new document outside the context of a binder. When you insert an existing document into a binder, you are essentially creating a copy of that document that communicates with the original document but does not communicate back to it. For example: if you switch the order of a few clauses in the original document, those changes will be reflected in the binder. If you do the same in the binder, those changes will not be reflected in the original document. For important adjustments to be made to the base document, it is therefore recommended to do this outside the context of the binder.
There is also the possibility to add a "new document". Choosing this means that you are creating a document in this binder that functions similarly to an ad hoc clause. The newly created document will only exist inside of this document and will not be accessible as a separate document in the library. It will therefore also be "unlocked" by default.
However, if you would eventually want to re-use this document either as an independent standalone document or as an existing document in another binder, you can save the document as an independent document by clicking the relevant option here:
As usual, numbering can easily get quite complex within legal documents, due to a mix of inherent complexity and limitations in MS Word. The numbering of subdocuments is no different, but Clause9 offers multiple approaches to cope with situations.
In what follows, we go deliberately quite deep into this subject, so you can completely understand what's going on, and also know how to maintain the resulting DOCX files after they have been generated by Clause9.
Essentially, when creating a cross-reference, MS Word requires you to either target an automatically numbered paragraph, or to target some bookmark. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages
Bookmarks around title paragraphs have the advantage that they're more flexible. They have the disadvantage that it takes more knowledge and time to assign such bookmark to document titles once you're maintaining your MS Word file after it was generated by Clause9. Bookmarks also have the disadvantage that you have to create two separate bookmarks in MS Word (one around the number of the document title, one around its body text) when you want to sometimes refer to just the number of the document's title, and sometimes to both the number and the text of the document's title.
Automatically numbered paragraphs can be created using MS Word styles that are assigned to title paragraphs. This approach works well when the automatic numbering system is not too difficult — which may not always be the case, e.g. when Annexes & Schedules have complex or strange numbering requirements for historical reasons. They have the advantage of being easy to assign in MS Word to document title paragraphs.
Clause9's approach is designed around the possibilities of MS Word for cross-references of automatically numbered titles. By default, Clause9 uses the bookmarking system. The automatic numbering system is an optional setting that can be activated, as described below.
For a deep dive into automatic numbering in MS Word, see our separate blogpost.
Let's take a simple example and use it to explain the different options that are available, as well as the rationale behind Clause9's title/numbering approach.
Suppose we have a simple binder with three subdocuments: a main body and two annexes.
The main document references the two other subdocuments through simple cross-tags assigned to those subdocuments:
Clause9 will automatically create bookmarks around each of the three subdocument titles. You can see these bookmarks when going to the Bookmarks option in the Insert tabsheet of the MS Word ribbon. (The bookmark names are deducted from the crosstags or the short/long titles assigned to a subdocument in the binder configuration, but MS Word constrains which characters can be used inside of the bookmark names.)
Inside of MS Word, you can create a cross-reference to a bookmark by going to the Reference tabsheet of the MS Word ribbon, clicking on Cross-reference and then choosing "Bookmark" in the upper-left corner of the dialog box that appears.
Inside of this dialog box, you can then choose the relevant target subdocument and hit the Insert button at the bottom of the dialog box. This will insert a clickable cross-reference to the target subdocument; in its default configuration, MS Word displays such cross-references in light grey on the screen.
When you would change the wording of the title of the subdocument, the cross-reference will automatically change when you update the cross-references (e.g., by printing the document, or by selecting everything and then hitting either F9 on your keyboard or right-clicking and choosing Update Field).
In the example above, the numbers of the subdocuments were hardcoded, i.e. the author typed in the 1 in "Annex 1 - Pricing" and the 2 in "Annex 2 - Technical configuration".
This is fine when the numbering of your subdocuments is known in advance. However, Clause9 can also automatically assign numbers to subdocuments. You can do so by inserting curly braces within the Full title / Short title of subdocuments in the binder configuration.
Clause9 will then automatically assign a number to each subdocument — e.g., skipping the number of a subdocument that happens to be disabled due to some condition not being met.
Within the curly braces, you can insert up to two special numbers — either the number "1", or the capital roman letter "I", or the capital letter "A". In addition, you can add any other characters or symbols you would wish, e.g. a period or parenthesis. This way, you can add multiple types of subdocuments, with up to two levels of completely automatically generated numbers. For example, you could create the following configuration:
Annex {1} - Pricing in general
Annex {1.1} - Hardware pricing
Annex {1.1} - Software pricing
Schedule {A} - Technical details
Schedule {A} - Contact details
Schedule {A.1} - Emergency contacts
Annex {1} - Security
This will create the following subdocument titles:
Annex 1 - Pricing in general
Annex 1.1 - Hardware pricing
Annex 1.2 - Software pricing
Schedule A - Technical details
Schedule B - Contact details
Schedule B.1 - Emergency contacts
Annex 2 - Security
Another example:
Annex {(1)} - Pricing
Schedule {1°,1} - Hardware pricing
Form {#A} - Contact details
Form {#A} - Emergency contacts
Docket {"I"} - Security configuration
Docket {"I"} - Security requirements
Subdocket {I.A} - Security requirements for Windows
Subdocket {I.A} - Security requirements for Mac
will result in:
Annex (1) - Pricing
Schedule 1°,1 - Hardware pricing
Form #A - Contact details
Form #B - Emergency contacts
Docket "I" - Security configuration
Docket "II" - Security requirements
Subdocket II.A - Security requirements for Windows
Subdocket II.B - Security requirements for Mac
It is crucial to understand that you always type in 1, A or I within the curly braces, even within subsequent documents. So don't type in Annex {2} or so!
The downside of the bookmark-based cross-referencing approach is that the entire text of the target paragraph — e.g., Annex 1 - Pricing — will always be inserted as such in the cross-reference.
This is probably OK with short titles such as "Pricing", but may be less desirable when the subdocument's title is long — e.g., Schedule 23 - Technical configuration of the customer's custom configuration — because this entire title will get repeated every time you insert a cross-reference towards the subdocument. Many legal professionals will instead want to refer to subdocuments by only their number — e.g. "Annex 1" or "Schedule 23".
Unfortunately, there is no possibility in MS Word to create a cross-reference with a caption that differs from the target paragraph. This is also the reason why the sample binder we created above, will contain plain text for short cross-references:
If you would instead switch to long cross-references, the DOCX file will include bookmark-based cross-references, because such is technically possible with MS Word:
Using its default settings, Clause9 will only create bookmark-based cross-references towards subdocument titles when you are using the full-title cross-references (or when the full title happens to be identical to the short title). When, instead, the full title and short title would differ from each other and you are inserting short-title cross-references to a subdocument, plain text will be inserted in the DOCX-file.
The underlying reason is that the bookmark-based approach would simply not work in the DOCX-file for short-title cross-references, as the target paragraph (i.e., the subdocument title) would contain different text. If you don't like this setting, you should enable the automatically numbered Word-styles for subdocument titles, as explained in the next section.
Clause9 offers another solution: automatically numbered subdocument title paragraphs.
You can activate this through the checkbox Use automatically numbered Word-styles for subdocument titles, situated below the subdocuments in the Binder:
When you activate this mode, Clause9 will use custom subdocument MS Word title styles with automatically assigned numbers (i.e. with curly braces) in the generated DOCX file. It will create such a style for each of the subdocuments for which you insert automatic numbers through curly braces {...} inside of the binder settings.
Clause9 will automatically split the full title into a numbering section (everything from the start of the full title up to the closing curly brace) and into the body text (everything from the closing curly brace up to the end). For example, if you would enter Annex {1} - Hardware pricing, then (if the annex would be third one) the short title would for example be Annex 3, while the long title would be Annex 3 - Hardware pricing. The entire short title will then be used as the numbering configuration in the custom numbering setup in MS Word for the subdocument.
Clause9's only requirement is that the "prefix" (i.e., what comes before the opening curly brace) remains the same across subdocuments with the same numbering format between the curly braces. If you don't respect this, you will get a warning, because your DOCX-file will then get strange numbering as a result, due to the limitations of MS Word:
For example, if we would use the following settings in our sample binder...
... then the resulting MS Word file would look as follows:
... with the subdocument titles having a special MS Word style called "Annex title" assigned to them, which contains an automatically generated number.
Clause9 will create custom subdocument-title-styles for each combination of subdocument with automatic numbering (i.e., with curly braces). For example, when the following full titles would be used:
Annex {(1)} - Pricing
Schedule {1°,1} - Hardware pricing
Form {#A} - Contact details
Form {#A} - Emergency contacts
Docket {"I"} - Security configuration
Docket {"I"} - Security requirements
Subdocket {I.A} - Security requirements for Windows
Subdocket {I.A} - Security requirements for Mac
Then the following subdocument-title-styles are created in MS Word. They will all have the same formatting, but differ in their numbering:
A generic "Document title" and "Subdocument title" (not numbered)
Annex Title, with automatic numbering "Annex (1)", "Annex (2)", "Annex (3)", etc.
Schedule Title, with automatic numbering "Schedule 1°.A,", "Schedule 1°.B", etc. Note that its first (decimal) number is retrieved from the parent subdocument-title-style Annex Title.
Docket Title, with automatic numbering "Docket I", "Docket II", "Docket III", etc.
Subdocket Title, with automatic numbering "Subdocket I.A,", "Subdocket I.B", etc. Note that its first (upper Roman) number is retrieved from the parent subdocument-title-style Docket Title.
Form Title, with automatic numbering "Forma A", "Form B", "Form C", etc.
The full title of the subdocument will always be used when printing the title of the subdocument (except in the situation described below under Using custom subdocument titles).
Conversely, when inserting cross-references, Clause9 can use either the full-title text or the short-title text.
As explained above, short-title cross-references will be inserted as plain text when the setting Use automatically numbered Word-styles for subdocument titles is not enabled, except when the full title and short title would happen to be identical.
You can configure whether to use full-title cross references or instead short-title cross-references, by changing the setting Referring to another document in a binder in the References styling:
This setting simultaneously configures the cross-references for referring to clauses in other subdocuments, and referrenting to other subdocuments as such. As explained in the ?-popup, if you use the placeholder "SHORT-DOCTITLE", then short-title cross-references will be used by default; if instead you use the placeholder LONG-DOCTITLE, then long-title cross-references will be used.
You can however manually override the default setting per cross-reference, by wrapping your cross-reference in a @long-ref or @short-ref. For example, if the cross-references styling would default to short-title cross-references, then cross-references like the following...
... will contain the short-title text in the resulting DOCX-file:
Conversely, when you would wrap the cross-references in a @long-ref...
... then the resulting DOCX-file will use full-title references (which usually will become true bookmarks):
Usually you want to enable the Print title checkbox for subdocuments, as this causes Clause9 to automatically generate a subdocument title as the first paragraph of each subdocument.
However, there are situations where you do not want this behaviour, e.g. if you want to subject the entire subdocument's title to some condition, or if you want to dynamically control the text of the title.
In such scenario, you must disable the Print title checkbox, and instead format some clause with a Custom styling for which the Format as document title setting is enabled.
ClauseBuddy will then render this clause with the same MS Word style as the subdocument titles for which Print title is enabled.
As explained by the info-popup, the clause will get an automatically calculated number if all the following conditions are met:
you format the clause as a document-title
you enabled Use automatically numbered Word-styles for subdocument titles in the binder-settings for the subdocument in which the clause is situated
the clause happens to be the first in the subdocument
Instead of hard-coding the title of the subdocument within the Title-part of the clause, you can also use the @subdoc-title special function. This will insert the text of the subdocument (as configured in the binder-settings) into the clause; when used within a binder for which Use automatically numbered Word-styles for subdocument titles is enabled, the {...} automatic numbering will also be dropped, because that numbering would otherwise get duplicated due to the MS Word that gets assigned to that clause in such situation.
Because Clause9 is limited by what is possible in MS Word, you should be aware of a few surprises:
When you enable Export subdocuments as separate files, a binder will be exported as a bundle of separate DOCX/PDF files. Because it's not possible to create bookmarks towards paragraphs in other files, Clause9 will use plain text cross-references when you refer to other subdocuments.
When you are using a binder for which Use automatically numbered Word-styles for subdocument titles is enabled:
If you insert cross-references towards an automatically numbered subdocument , then Clause9 must insert two cross-references next to each other: one towards the number of the target subdocument title, and and one with the text of that subdocument title. You should be aware that MS Word sometimes inserts a double space, or drops a period in such situations.
If you include a cross-reference towards a subdocument for which Print title is not enabled, and there's no clause present (& enabled as per its conditions) in that subdocument for which Format as document-title is enabled, then your subdocument-numbering will become erroneous, because MS Word's numbering for the subdocuments will depend on having exactly one paragraph in each subdocument that is formatted with the special MS Word style for that subdocument title. Clause9 will however warn you for this situation in the binder-configuration.
