How to Create Reusable Content - Add New Docs to Wizard Database - (2024)

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In this video we're going to show another method of creating reusable content for the Wizard. In the previous video in this series we showed you how to make copies of existing templates. That feature is good for making copies of templates for assembling into the full proposal.

This particular video is going to cover adding external documents to the Wizard database that can be selected that are not going to be assembled into the full proposal, but they'll just be copied into your project folder during the document creation process. You can also add mail merge tags to these documents as well. So this situation is good for when you have your external documents such as a contract or a checklist or some ancillary material that you want copied into your project but not necessarily merged into the actual proposal or business plan or assembled document from all the parts.

One of the reasons for this is during the document assembly process when multiple chapters are all assembled into a complete document if you have a completely independent document you merge in you could wind up with formatting issues. That's why in that situation its better to use the feature to make copies of our existing chapter templates then put your custom content into those and that way you would retain the formatting of our templates that will be assembled into the full document. So for this example we've created a couple external documents that we're going to add to the Wizard database.

One is just a standard Word document. We've put in some tags here which during the document processing the wizard will make a copy of this template into your project folder and do mail merge. The other template we're going to add to the database is showing you an example of how a complete document was actually generated and assembled in the Wizard previously.

But now we want to take that assembled document that's been completely edited and made ready for our future proposals and we just want to use that completely assembled document as its own template. Just copied for each future proposal and do mail merging on it. In this case we're just going to make a copy of that assembled template do some data merging and that will speed up our process for creating multiple client proposals.

So this template here you can see we have the Cover Letter, we've filled in our content but we've left the tags in for the name and address mail merging. And you'll see in this example we've created a janitorial or cleaning company proposal. And you'll see this example has been assembled using the Wizard in a previous project and now that FullProposal.doc we've renamed to be a janitorial services template and we're going to use the Wizard to add these two templates back into the Wizard databases as selectable templates.

So here is how we do this. Now that we have the documents created and edited we'll click the Preferences button. Now this is an Expert Edition Wizard feature, being able to customize the database.

Click the Tools tab and click the Configure Proposal Files button. Ok, for the Proposal Type we'll just keep this General Business Proposal. This is the common default, this is the most common and the default, list of chapters.

Now we'll click the Create and Add New Document button. This is the same screen from the previous video where we showed you how to make copies of existing templates. To add our own templates scroll up to the very top of the list and you'll see a Browse to a New Custom File not in this List.

Select that and you'll be given a Browse button. We're going to browse to the files in our MyDoc's folder we just showed you. And I'll add this one page template and we'll give it a title.

Now this is the important drop down to select to make sure that the document will be treated externally during the assembly process and won't be assembled into the generated document. So you want to select Section 10 or Section 11. As anything in these two lists that you would set it to will be treated externally.

If you use any of these other Sections this will cause the Wizard to then try to assemble that template into the master template that it's creating. So we'll just put this in Section 10. Click OK.

Now the Wizard is adding this new template into its database as a selectable document when you are in the Pick Document screen. It'll also give you an option to open it and make edits but we've already edited this file so we're going to just close this for now and we're going to add the second page, our preassembled services proposal for that janitorial cleaning company. Again, select the Browse to a New Custom File not in this List option.

Leave this as Section 10. Now this is a preassembled template for an entire proposal. Okay, now we've added these two templates into the Wizard's database.

Now we want to make it easier to find them later on in the Pick Document screen so we're going to use the Top 40 lists and add these to our Custom 1 Top 40 list. You'll see that the title we gave it is now in this alphabetical drop–down and you'll see the other one we named Records Retention Application is in this drop–down. Now we've added these two new templates we just added to the database to a custom Top 40 list.

Make sure to click the Save button. And we will now exit the Preferences. Now we're ready to start using these custom templates we've added to the database.

So we're going to create a Document Project and this time we're going to leave the merge data checklist turned on. It was turned off when that janitorial cleaning company proposal was created the first time to retain the tags. Now we'll go to the Pick Document screen, click our Custom 1 Top 40 list and you'll see our new templates are selectable.

We're going to add both of these to our project and this saves the time of having to individually find and check off all the individual chapters making up this template. We're just going to select the entire preassembled and edited template. Click OK and we'll make sure the Company Data is filled in and we'll fill in the Client Data.

And we're ready to create a project. Now because these templates were added as individual files the Wizard is just going to make copies of the two files into our project folder and do mail merging to them. It won't be assembling multiple pages together anymore.

Now you see the Wizard is creating our project documents. You'll see the name and address and date tags have been merged into this copy. And the completely assembled template was copied and the name and address tags have been inserted.

And it's ready to finish for this particular client. So that is how you add new Word documents into the Wizard database for the Wizard to manage for your individual projects.