About cards

About cards

A card is a group of questions that are visually presented together towards the user. For example, the following card is entitled “About the employee” and has two different questions inside it (“Name” and “Employed full-time?”).

Each card can have one or more conditions attached to it (e.g., “only show this card if the answer to some other card is XYZ”), and can optionally be given a different color (instead of the standard dark blue). By default, all cards are listed below each other. However, if you have many cards in your questionnaire, it could be interesting to put cards into separate categories (so that only the cards of the currently active category are shown) and/or to increase the left-margin of certain cards in order to visually separate them from their peers. More on that below.

Productivity tip: you can temporarily hide a card while Simulating a Q&A, by Alt-clicking on the card’s title. You will notice that a popup-list with the hidden cards will then appear in the bottom bar of the screen, from where you can restore hidden cards.

About questions

ClauseBase currently offers the following types of questions.

yes / no	The user can only choose one of two options.You can easily relabel “yes” and “no”, e.g. to “true” and “false” or “correct” and “wrong”.
text	The user can give one or more text-based answers — e.g., a person’s name or address, or the name of the city of the competent court.
number	The user can give an answer that consists of a “whole” single number — e.g., 5 or 88 or 6534654. The advantage of using a number is that such numbers can be used for calculations. Some answers may seem to require a number question, but should actually be obtained through a text question. For example, if the user would need to insert a VAT number, it may be tempting to use a number field. However, this would prevent the user from typing in dots in between the number groups (e.g., “0865.793.690”), and would also prevent the user from inserting a prefix such as “BE” or “NL”. Similarly, it is advisable to request a house number using a text question, because house numbers sometimes contain extra characters that do not fit within a number (e.g., “6a” or “6/5”).
floating point number	A number with a decimal point — e.g., “10.5” or “124.567” Through the styling settings, you can centrally change whether to use continental numbers (“1.234,51”) or Anglosaxon style floating numbers (“1,234.51).
currency	A floating point number accompanied by one of the supported currencies — e.g., 15 EUR, 20 £, or 1234.44 US dollars. Through the styling settings, you can centrally change how currencies should be displayed (how to format the floating point number, whether to use currency symbols or words, before or after the number, etc.)
date	A specific date — e.g., 5 January 2019 or 24 December 1997.
duration	A period of time — e.g., 3 days, 51 weeks or 4 years.
document language	Which language to use in the resulting document. Thanks to the advanced multi-lingual capabilities of ClauseBase, it is possible to show cards & questions in a certain language (e.g., French), while producing a contract in a different language (e.g., English). This allows users who do not master a certain language to create legal documents in that language.
comment	A comment is not presented as a question, but instead as a paragraph of gray text. This allows you to provide additional information to your users. Another way to present comments to users, is to attach a “help text” to a question. Unlike a comment, such help text will only be displayed when the user hovers over the comment-icon. Tip: URLs — e.g., https://www.clausebase.com — will be recognized, so that users can click on them and a new browser tab/window will be opened. You can also insert square brackets containing a description of the link before the actual link . For example, This page leads to the [ClauseBase homepage] https://www.clausebase.com if clicked. will be shown as This page leads to the ClauseBase homepage if clicked.
warning	A warning is similar to a comment, but is displayed in red.
table	A table can be used when the user has to provide multiple associated answers — e.g., the contact details of all the buyers, or the name – title – gender of a list of employees.