Office & Dragons

Document automation in O&D differs in key ways from other applications. These guidelines will help you get started quickly and simply.

How to automate documents in Office & Dragons

Give placeholder representing a unique concept a unique, descriptive name in square brackets, like [Borrower Name] or [loan amount].

You can find and replace any amount of content in your documents, manipulating lists, working with cross-references, and much more!

The logic is the rules that choose what text to insert, delete, or keep in the documents.

In most cases, complex, pre-determined content should live in the document and everything else should live in the turnsheet.

If you don't want the final text in the document to be bold and highlighted yellow, remove that formatting from the document.

Before anything else, make sure that all of your placeholders are correctly identified in your turnsheet.

Use column types, the hide-columns feature, descriptions, and Forms to build user interfaces.

When you do want to add more automation to get closer to 100%, finish one small thing at a time.

Almost always, you get 80% of the benefit of automating a document with 20% of the work, so do that fast and invite colleagues to use it.

Automate complex documents with clause variations, conditions, and calculations. Built user interfaces. Create fully automated templates.