The end product of contract automation is, of course, a document. The Weagree Wizard has a few settings for document generation, which affect the Wizard’s exact output. These settings are available on the Administrator page, under the Configuration subitem of Contract automation. This was briefly mentioned in the Basic contract automation configuration tutorial, but will be covered more extensively below.
1. Document name format
This is the default, general format for document names. Unless specified otherwise in a contraction automation template’s settings, this format will apply to every document generated by the Weagree Wizard. It consists of one or more tags recognised by the Weagree Wizard, which will be replaced by regular text upon document generation. By default, the format is [relation.2.Shortname] [documenttitle], which will result in a document name such as “Counterparty Ltd. License agreement 001.docx (where “001” denotes that this is the first version). Choosing a default format – as well as a customised format for a particular contract automation template – is explained in full here.
2. Default template
The overall look of a generated document, in terms of font type, formatting, numbering and so on, is determined by a Word template (dotx-file). If multiple dotx-files have been uploaded to the Weagree Wizard, you may choose any as the default (Word) template. Note that this is not the same as a contract automation template: the latter is only determinative of a document’s structure and contents. The default dotx-file will be applied to any document users generate, unless a different dotx-file has been selected from the contract automation’s settings. It is therefore possible to use different dotx-files for different contract automation templates (i.e. types of documents). For further information on how to configure and use dotx-files, click here.
3. TOC separator
The table of contents (TOC) separator is simply the character being used in Microsoft Word’s TOC fields to separate style tags (which are used to identify headers, and therefore tell Word which parts of the text to include in the TOC). By default, the separator is a comma (,) and this setting will generally not need changing. Depending on or your operating system’s localisation settings, however, Word might require another separator such as a semi-colon (;) to work correctly when manually editing a document generated by the Weagree Wizard. Otherwise, it will not be possible to update the TOC after adding or removing any text.
Note 1: regardless of this setting, the Weagree server uses a comma when generating a document. The immediate effect of changing the TOC separator in the Weagree Wizard will be that the TOC in the generated document will be empty. Word will indicate that no TOC entries have been found. You will have to update the TOC field in Word (in Windows: press Ctrl+A to select the entire text and then press F9 to update all fields) to generate it anew. If the separator matches your system’s localisation settings, a complete TOC will appear.
Note 2: bear in mind that the TOC separator should reflect the separator actually used by your organisation’s computers. If its employees use systems with different settings, for example because of a multilingual working environment, it is best to leave the TOC separator unchanged. This will at least ensure that the documents as generated by the Weagree Wizard have complete, correct TOCs. Should such documents need to be edited manually, the TOC field’s separators can be directly changed in Word to match any system settings. In Windows: press Alt+F9 to display the field code, replace the commas in the field with semi-colons (or whichever other character applies), press Alt+F9 again, then finally update all fields via Ctrl+A and F9.
In Microsoft Windows, you can check – and change – your system’s separator as follows:
a. Open the Control Panel (you can use the Windows search function for this) and click on Change date, time or number formats under the Clock and Region header.
b. Click Additional settings.
c. Verify or change the List separator.
d. After making any change, click Apply.
4. Use the default-font blob
The Weagree Wizard’s contract automation templates commonly make use of a blob (●) as a placeholder if a question has not been answered yet. By default, a wingding blob is used – independent of the actual font used in the document (which is determined by the aforementioned Word template, or dotx-file). If preferred, however, that font’s proper blob character may be used instead by enabling this switch.
5. Add secondly generated
When switched off, the Weagree Wizard will overwrite the existing Word or PDF when generating a document from the same questionnaire (i.e. for the same individual contract) for the second, third, fourth, etc. time. If this option is enabled, however, it will continue to add a new, separate version of the document each time one is generated. Leaving this off will generally be more convenient during contract automation template insertion and testing, or if users commonly generate multiple incomplete drafts. Switching it on will make it easy to automatically create a complete dossier of different versions, which can be particularly useful if it is common for multiple persons (be it co-workers or third parties with guest accounts) to collaborate in drafting new contracts.
Note: even if this setting is disabled, it is of course possible to create a dossier by downloading each iteration of the generated document, incrementing the document name’s number (or otherwise changing the name to reflect its version) and then uploading it back to the contract’s repository.
