3 Easy Optimizations to Speed Up Document Creation - (2024)

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In this video we're just going to cover three easy ways to optimize the Proposal Pack Wizard to make creating your future proposals if you're going to be creating a number of proposals more efficient. There are specific videos for each of these three topics you can refer to as well that will go into them each in more detail. A lot of people use the Proposal Pack Wizard to just create a one–off document so you don't need to do all these optimizations in that case.

So this is more for the people who are going to be using the Proposal Pack over and over again and who wanted to operate a little faster and more efficiently. Out of the box the Wizard is set up without any of these optimizations on because they each require a little bit of customization. So the first thing we will show is what's called the Presets.

Each time you're going to create a document you have to have a list of chapters selected that the Wizard will assemble into a document and you can check these off or use the Search by Name, all these dropdowns. All these tabs are just different ways of getting chapters into your project. If we're going to create lots of proposals and they're not very long.

Let's just say we have a Cover Letter, Title Page, an Executive Summary, Cost Summary, a list of services, your Company History and then the Back Page. If you're going to use the same set chapters for all your future projects or maybe these are going to be your core chapters and maybe on a client basis you're going to make some minor changes like adding an extra page as needed. Using the Preset gives you that flexibility and the Preset just means you don't have to recheck off the same set of chapters every time.

Especially if you're selecting chapters that are off in other sections of these screens that might take a little bit more work to get to every single time. So now that we have our set of chapters selected, just click the Presets and I'll just make a name for it My Services List. You can create a lot of different Presets.

Now that we created one, in the future the next time we create a new project we can just pick the Preset and not have to individually check off all those chapters each time. You can also automatically populate each new project from that Preset which makes it even faster. We're just going to turn that on.

We'll show this in use and we'll just create this document. Now this document has been generated. So you can see this is a fill–in–the–blank version with boilerplate text.

We're illustrating this with our Nature #7 design theme. We have hundreds of design themes to pick from. You can see all the chapters are fill in the blank.

We do have a lot of samples you can pull in the sample content but in general if you're going to be writing a one–off proposal you could just fill this in with your word processor, finish it off and send it. You don't have to worry about future proposals being setup with reusable content. So this next optimization is for those who want to write multiple proposals and have your custom text reused each time so you don't have to paste it in or fill in the blanks for the whole document every single time.

That's the second optimization. I'll show how to edit our stock templates with your content. So just go back to the project screen and I'll add a new project.

This is going to illustrate the Preset as well. You can see seven templates were automatically selected just by creating a project. That was the Wizard pulling in our Preset.

Now you can see the same set of chapters is automatically selected in the project. This just saved us the time of going and finding all these chapters and checking them off using the Preset. Now how do we edit efficiently all of the templates for reuse in the future.

Well, there's two ways in the Wizard to get to the templates. Since we're already in the project screen we can click this Show all Templates button on the Add Templates tab. Now you'll have dropdowns for the two thousand plus chapters.

How do we find just the couple or few we want to edit that we're going to use every time? Because we have the chapters we're going to use checked off in the project already this gets a lot easier. I can click this box Only Show Templates Selected for my Project and now instead of two thousand options in these dropdowns it's only the 7 selected. You can see it matches here that I have selected.

So I've pre–written two pages worth of content here. This is content you might already have written for your company like an introduction cover letter you want to keep reusing, your executive summary. It could be your list of services, your price lists, your company history, your background, recommendations, references, policies.

Any of the information you're going to put into your proposals each time you're going to edit into our stock templates. So you just select any chapter. Right now I'm selecting the Cover Letter.

Arrow pointing to this button Edit Selected Stock Template. Click that and it's going to open Proposal Packs stock template that's going to get built into each proposal. You can see this is the boilerplate text.

Now this is just some example text we've already written. So say if you've written whatever text anywhere you have saved somewhere copy and paste it over at the top of our text. You can see I'm replacing the boilerplate instructional text with this pre written text.

This is just basic word processing using Word to copy paste text into a document. If you have this text of yours in your website or other documents or brochures, wherever you have it. All you need to do is get that text copied and paste it into our templates and then reformat as needed and you're good to go.

So now I'll save this and note I am working in Word right now so this is not using our Wizard software. I'm just editing a Word document in Word. So I'll save that and it saved our Proposal Pack stock template.

I've also got an introduction written so we'll edit that into our Executive Summary. You don't have to use our structure I just happen to have some pre–written executive summary text here just for illustration purposes. Copy this and paste it right in here.

Okay, now I've pasted this in and I've applied the custom bullet points for this design theme and that's just by using the custom bullet point for this design theme. I can save this. Now we've added two of the Proposal Kits stock templates for this design theme that we have installed and you can just do that for any of the templates like Company History here, the services list and so on.

So now every time we build a new document and we use the Cover Letter or the Executive Summary our edited version gets built into all future documents. We'll just select some client data here for illustration purposes and we'll save this and build your document. We will see the custom edited templates pulled in now that we've generated this document.

We'll take a look at it and you can see where it applied the mail merge data here and here. This is the edited version of the Cover Letter. It put in the mail merge data here and you can see this is the edited version of the Executive Summary.

So those first two customizations will get a lot of people taken care of for making your document generation for multiple proposals much more efficient. There are a lot of other things you can do. These are the two most common easiest ones to get started with.

The third thing we'll show is useful if you have a lot of chapters selected and that set of chapters will be the same every single time and the time it takes you to assemble the proposals is taking a little too long for you. That feature is an Expert Edition feature we'll show next. The first two are both a Novice Edition feature and an Expert Edition feature.

That is called a reusable template so basically that just means the Wizard isn't going to assemble all the selected chapters every single time. It is just going to use a completely assembled document just like the one we've just created and it's just going to simply copy that document for each future proposal and save you the time of doing all the assembly of all the pages. What you do is you have to create a reusable template first.

There's a whole other video on this process that goes into the details a lot more. We'll just show the quick and easy version. So what we'll do is go back into the same project.

We're going to regenerate this document again but we're going to not merge in name and address information. We're going to uncheck this merge button and because we generated this document already we're going to delete the files and start from scratch because we haven't actually edited that document. We have the same several templates selected.

We're going to be pulling in our two custom edited pages. Turn off the merging of the company and client data so the tags will still be in there and that's going to get us our reusable template. We'll save this project and build the template again just without the data merged in.

Okay, now that we've generated our document that's going to become our reusable template we'll take a look at that. Now you can see all the tags are still in the document because we turned off the data merging but it pulled in our content that we edited already. You can see all the tags are still here so now this is a fully assembled document that we can now use as a reusable template instead of assembling it from all the pieces every single time.

How you do that is you just select that document we've created and we're going to click this Create Reusable Template button and the Wizard is going to add this as a custom document into the database that can be selected in our project screen. We're just going to give it a title here. All right, so I've just given it a title and a description, click OK and let the Wizard add it to the database.

Using these reusable templates we don't necessarily have to use the Presets anymore because now we'll just have a single document to select. Okay, now the Wizard has added it to the database. In this demo we actually turned on the use of the Preset to be automatically loaded so we're gonna have to go turn that off.

Right now what you'll see is our custom proposal is now selectable here. On the Preset we're just goign to go turn that off. I'll just back out of this project.

All right, so we've backed out of the project after we turned off our Preset. Okay now that we've turned off the use of the Preset we can go add a new project. We click the Pick Documents screen and because we added a custom template it's automatically showing it to us as our default page we first see.

Check that, click OK and we have our reusable template selected. We will pick some accompanying client data. We'll just load a default record.

All right, so we have our reusable template selected, we have our company and client data selected, got the merge turned on. When we save this project instead of assembling seven pages and doing all the document manipulation that can be a little time consuming it is going to just copy the reusable template and do the mail merge to it. So this will be a lot faster for creating a lot of ongoing proposals.

Alright, this document has been generated from the reusable template and you can see the name and address information has merged in and the rest of the template is copied right over. So that's it for the three quick and easy ways to speed up the Wizard when generating multiple ongoing proposals.