Software updates — June 2020

New features

  • You can now apply one of the predefined answers of a question when the user modifies the answer to some other question.
  • You can now search on cross-tags, and click on a cross-tag in a clause in order to find clauses that implement that cross-tag.
  • You can now get an interactive preview of a Q&A document by holding down the Shift-key when pressing the “PDF” button. This functionality already existed within the Assemble Documents mode, but is now also available for Q&A users.

Q&A improvements

  • In addition to the predefined list of 11 colours (dark blue, light blue, orange, black, etc.), you can now mix your own color for card titles.
  • For all four card indentation levels, you can assign default colours in the Q&A options, so you no longer have to assign colours to each card separately. In addition, the customer’s administrator can also assign default colours for all card indentation levels, which will be used unless deviated from in the Q&A options or on a per-card basis.
  • Several new layout options for questions are added (and described in detailed):
    • placeholders for text questions
    • option to hide a question’s title
    • changing the title color
    • indenting a question up to three levels
    • merging a question with the previous / next question (i.e., removing the grey dividing line)
    • adding a suffix (such as “%” or some measurement unit) next to a question’s answer box
    • adding validations to an answer, to prevent invalid answers such as incorrect email addresses
  • A new Q&A option allows you to allow show a card’s title in CAPITALS.

Other improvements

  • Functionality change. To prevent cluttered screen content, the condition and options of a Q&A card or question will no longer appear within the card or question by default. Instead, the condition or options panel will appear in a popup, where you can optionally attach it to the card or question by clicking the pin icon .
  • Administrators of an enterprise account can set custom CSS styling for all their users’ accounts. This will be particularly useful for styling anonymous Q&A links that are made available to outside users, e.g. in law firm client portals or on webshops.
  • You can now reload the CSS and document styling options by Shift-pressing the green button (or button with logo) in the upper left corner of the screen. This avoids administrators from having to manually refresh a web page in order to see how the default styling applies to users’ documents.

    Note: in addition to Shift-clicking the upper-left button, you may also have to manually press recalculate to force-refresh the styling of documents opened in the Q&A or Assemble Documents.
  • When you type in (single or double) quotes, parentheses, square brackets or curly braces, you will now immediately get two matching pairs. This may seem like a small addition, but will probably significantly reduce the number of errors when drafting.
  • The error-reporting is now much-improved. When you hover your mouse over an error, you get a set of hints that should significantly help you where you went wrong.
  • When you are typing in the name of a function in the editor, you can now get a list of matching functions by pressing Control + Spacebar after you have inserted the @-symbol and at least a few letters:
  • When you want to get a summary of the function’s purpose and arguments, you can now press the same shortcut Control + Spacebar when your cursor is between the parentheses of that function:
  • You can now use the if/then/else construct { … } to switch between values in a calculation — previously you could only use this construct to insert text values. Read more.

New special functions

  • @to-paragraphs allows you to split a large textual answer of an end-user into separate paragraphs
  • The @footnote and @endnote functions allow you to insert footnotes and endnotes. Using standard snippets functionality, ClauseBase will effectively allow you to build libraries of footnotes and endnotes — particularly handy for legal briefs.

Other changes

  • You can now hold Shift when translating a card or question in the Q&A, to overwrite existing content in the target language.
  • An in-depth explanation of how data types work in ClauseBase is now added.