How to Use the Document Batch Processing Tools - (2024)

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In this video we're going to show how the Document Batch Processing features work. This is an Expert Edition feature of the Wizard software and it's located in two different places. It's the same set of tools but the Preferences version is intended for use on any documents.

You can get that by clicking the Preferences, then Tools tab and click Batch Process Documents. You'll see the set of tools and then you can browse to a folder and then once you've browsed to a folder you'll have the list of files in that folder you can select from to then apply these tools to. Some of these tools are really intended for your Proposal Kit generated documents.

Other tools are best used for other documents that are outside the Proposal Kit system that you just want to apply some of our styling to or Word font styles and so on. The second place, and we'll describe each of these tools in more detail in the other screen, is in the Edit Current Document screen. If you have the Expert Edition you'll have this Document Processing tab.

It's the same set of tools that we just showed you in the other screen, the Preferences, but this is going to be your list of documents for your current project you've created and it's not going to show you all the individual sub–chapter templates in your project folder just the main documents like your combined assembled proposal or business plan, any extra separate letters, contracts, invoices and and so on. You can select these and then apply any of these tools. These tools are really intended for either cleaning up or fixing up and testing your documents after having created and then editing them.

Or, you just want to get them ready to send to your client or upload to whatever system you're sending them to. I'll just go over the tools that we have currently. Tool 1) remove important body text.

This is for when you have an editor's version or instructional text that you've left in the document that you want to ensure gets removed. In this case we have this red text which is instructional text and that tool will remove all of this red instructional text. Some people use this red instructional text which is just a Word font style we've defined which is called Proposal Kit Important Body Text which is just the Normal body text with red color.

Some people will use this Word style to write in questions for editors to answer into the various templates and then once those editors have finished writing their proposal and they've replaced the instructional text with the real text or they've just left the questions in place and during your final clean cleanup you just want to remove all of that instructional text from the document. This tool will do that for you, it'll just run through the document and delete all the red important text. Test for leftover tags, so all of our Proposal Kit templates have the data tags or instructional text within these double brackets.

This tool just tests your document to ensure that you've removed all the tags or replaced all the tags with actual data. Apply custom headers and footers, this is just allows you to change the header or footer in the body text if you decided you need to change that after a document has been assembled. The Wizard has a feature where in your Proposal Pack's MyGraphics folder if you create a custom header or footer template, and we have examples here in these folders, which is a custom header or custom footer you can actually define your own custom footers and headers that will get applied to the document.

Normally this is done during document assembly but if you decided you need to make a change to that after the document's been assembled then you can use this tool to do that. Add Proposal Kit defined Word styles, this is more for documents that are outside the Proposal Kit system because the Proposal Kit ones will all have our Word styles included in them already. Update metadata, this will just reapply the metadata settings in your Preferences if you've changed your Preferences metadata values after a document has been generated.

Apply current style color scheme, this just gives you the chance to change the color scheme applied to Word table cells, page borders and so on after a document has been created. These are all things you can do manually yourself but these tools can help automate these processes. Update page settings from the current style, again if you want to change the margin, border styles, border settings and so on.

Convert all URLs, this tool will just run through all the text in your document and look for anything that's an email address or a URL and it will convert it to clickable links. Update page borders. Replace watermark, this one is for changing the background watermark style of your assembled document.

You can see in the body pages that we have these colored shape objects, we have a background watermark. This tool will let you change that background if you've decided you need to change the colors, change the design, put in a new watermark or so on. In your PNG_Graphics folder we have this WatermarkBody file which holds the background that gets inserted into your document when it's generated.

You can actually make changes to this, save this, run this tool and apply your updated watermark background to your assembled document. Move full size shapes to back of ZOrder and the delete full size body watermark shapes, these two are mainly there for cleaning up potential issues with older versions of Word that might get the ZOrder of your shape objects incorrect which might hide some of your background watermarks behind a shape object that you need to reorder the ZOrder to get everything back looking the way it should. This happens rarely and it kind of depends on your how old your version of Word is and sometimes it's computer specific.

So these two are just to help clean up that potential issue with your background watermarks. Update table of contents, this will just re–number, reorder and recreate your Table of Contents object if you've made changes to your document that changed the the chapter headers or the page numbering. You can always just right click the TOC object in the document and just update it manually since it's a standard Word object or if you're not sure how to do that you can just use this tool to do it for you.

I'll just show this in operation real quick. We can click our assembled document and we're just going to remove the important body text and do a test on the leftover tags. We haven't edited this assembled document so it will find leftover tags and you should see that red body text deleted.

Because this is going to make changes to a document you've probably been editing if you leave these checked it will actually make a backup copy of all your work before it applies these tools. That backup will be in a backup folder in your project folder and we'll show that in a second. You'll see it did tell us it found the instructional tag delimiter in the body text of the document and it's finished processing.

Now we can go over to the main document screen here and open our assembled document and as we scroll down you can see we have tags in here. Anything with these brackets will get flagged by that tool test. You'll see on this estimate page all that instructional text was right here and that's all been deleted now.

So that is really how to use the document processing tools in the Wizard to help do tests and clean up on your final documents.