How to Use Team Editing Mode - (2024)

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In this video we're going to describe how the Team Editing feature works in the Expert Edition of the Wizard software. The Team Editing feature is used when multiple people are assigned to do the writing on a single proposal whereas, most of the time, when you're using the Wizard you're assembling a Word document and then one person is doing all that work. One person is probably going to be filling in the proposal or just passing it around maybe between a couple people.

Where the team editing is going to be for a much larger project. Usually and probably for government RFP responses. So how you turn on the team editing feature because it's turned off by default is just click the Preferences button and in the General Settings tab you see this Enable Team Editing with some radio buttons.

Once you check this box, that turns on the Team Editing feature and you have three options here to pick from on how the Wizard's going to do the assembly or not of the assembled proposal document during the time you save your project. By default when you select some pages in your project and you save your project that's when the Wizard will assemble the whole document for you during project save time. You can control this by only having the Wizard copy over the individual chapter pages and those individual chapter pages where you have the Executive Summary and your cost pages and body pages, all those individual documents.

You can have the Wizard not combine them at that time because you're going to do the combining later when all the people have finished editing their individual chapter templates. It doesn't really matter technically whether you assemble the proposal at that time or not because if you do you're just going to ignore it and then you'll just reassemble it and overwrite it. You can save some time by skipping the assembly of the combined proposal if you use the ask Yes/No option.

The Wizard will just ask you a Yes/No question at the time you save your project if you want to build the assemble document at that point. You can just say yes or no. So once you've set this up we'll just check Ask Yes/No and that's all there is to turning on the team editing feature.

I'll show this in practice, so we'll create a project and you can also control on a per project basis combining it just by unchecking this box. If we leave this checked but we turned on the team editing feature and told it to not do the combining it will just ignore what this checkbox is set to. Same with if we use the Yes/No feature, if we use the Yes/ No option and team editing is turned on it will just ignore this checkbox here and just go straight to a Yes/No question for you.

I'll select a few pages, and this team editing feature is usually going to be for a very large proposal so maybe you might be picking 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 different pages and you're going to have a team of people who are going to be assigned to work on different chapters. We'll just do a short one here. But say you have three people who are going to be working on this proposal.

One person is in charge of all the cost related pages, one person is in charge of all the company related pages another person is responsible for all the body pages for the actual project. How you split that work up is completely up to you. Now that we've selected our chapters we'll click the OK, Save Project button and it'll ask us that Yes/No do we want to assemble it at the end here.

What the Wizard is doing now is its normal process of copying all the individual chapter templates into your project folder. So, say if you've selected 20 or 30 chapters those 20 or 30 pages are all going to be copied into your project folder as individual Word documents. Then it's up to you how you're going to assign the editing.

You can also use the Wizards features to locate your project folder out on a shared network drive and then just give everyone access to that shared folder. Then once everybody's finished editing their documents either they can edit them separately on their own computers and copy them all back into the project folder when everyone's done. Whoever is in charge of your document management system can do the assembly of the combined proposal.

Okay, now this is the Yes/No question that the Wizard will ask you. If you want to assemble the document at this point we can just say no. You notice since we skipped that, when the Wizard opens the Edit Your Current Project document screen instead of putting us on the default documents tab it goes straight to putting us on the Team Editing tab.

That's because if we click over here there's no assembled proposal yet. On the Team Editing tab we have links to the individual chapter templates that haven't been assembled yet. So we can open these up directly from this folder.

This just opens up this single page and you can do your editing on here or we can open the project folder and this will just open up the actual folder on your hard drive or your shared network drive where all the files are located. Then you can assign people to edit specific pages and then when everybody's work is done either on these pages themselves or people have copied them off into their own computers and edited them then copied them back over here. When you're all ready to do the assembly just click back over to this Team Editing tab and simply click the Recombine all Templates button.

Now the Wizard is appending them all together. Okay, now the document's been assembled and if we click over to the main tab you'll see our combined and assembled document with all of the chapters combined. That is all there is to using the Team Editing feature.

Now this Document Processing tab will have another video that will go into this in more detail. This can also be used in conjunction with the Team Editing feature where since you're having multiple people all doing editing on different documents and then combining them all together. Once that document's been combined you can run some of these tools against that document to either test for leftover tags that might have been accidentally left in.

If you're doing an editors version versus a production version using the important body text then there's a tool to remove any leftover instructional text and so on. We'll describe these features in another video but that is all there is to using the Team Editing feature of the Wizard software.