ClauseBase allows you to set many global options to customize the behaviour and look-and-feel of a Q&A. These options can be accessed through the 
button in the toolbar.
Language options
These options — only available in multilingual versions of ClauseBase — allow you to specify how ClauseBase should deal with multiple languages in the Q&A:
- The output language refers to the language used in the document (i.e. at the right side of the screen when the questionnaire is shown to the user), as exported to DOCX or PDF.
- The card & question language refers to the language used within the cards & questions (i.e. at the left side of the screen when the questionnaire is shown to the user).
For both the output and the card/question language, you can specify the standard language:
- Either you can select one of the languages available in your environment (e.g., “French”). In such case, that language will be used towards the end-user, even when the end-user has his/her language set to some other language.
- Or you can select “primary account language“. It will then depend on the end-user’s account settings which language will be chosen.
Note that when “primary account language” is chosen, but the user’s primary account language is not enabled in a specific Q&A, then another enabled language will be chosen.
For example, when English/French/Dutch are available in the system, but Dutch has been disabled for a particular Q&A, then a user whose primary account language is set to Dutch, will see the questionnaire in English.
Card titles in capitals
By enabling this option, you can show all card titles in CAPITALS, irrespective of how those titels were actually typed in.
Default colours for cards
For each of the four indentation levels of a card, you can optionally specify the default color. Only cards that have their own color specified, will then be shown in a different color.
This setting overrules the default colours that may have been assigned by your administrator for all user accounts.
Indicators for mandatory questions
This setting allows you to enable or disable the red dots that appear next to questions flagged as mandatory in the question options. In addition, ClauseBase will shown a warning bar when mandatory questions are not yet completed.
Note that, even when mandatory questions are unanswered, users can still save answers and/or export the document.
Export to subdocuments
By checking the Enabled by default (if binder) option, you force the output of a Binder to be a .ZIP file that will list each subdocument as a separate file in the .ZIP file container.
Multi-language export
If Disabled is checked, then the user will not be allowed to export a document into multiple languages (through multiple columns).
Interactively recalculate contents
By default, ClauseBase interactively recalculates the visibility of all cards/questions/predefined answers, as well as the body of the entire document/binder, with every change you make.
In very long or complex documents, this may result in delays on slower computers. While end-users can always manually enable/disable the interactive recalculation using the
popup-menu at the right-hand side of the screen, you can also disable this interactive recalculation upfront using this setting in the Q&A’s options.
Availability of Q&A
You can temporarily make a Q&A unavailable. This can be useful in situations where you want to apply significant changes to the Q&A and you want to avoid that your end-users would inadvertently use a version that is still under construction.
End-users that would try to access an unavailable Q&A will see the following message:
Swap languages
While ClauseBase supports 28 languages, there are many more languages in the world. If you happen to have a document for which you really need a specific language to be supported outside of the list of 28 languages, then you can use the language swapping methodology.
For example, assume you are working on a Belgian ClauseBase server (which supports Dutch, French and English), but a particular document needs to be shown in Dutch and Korean. You then choose one of the other languages — e.g., French — and pretend it contains Korean content.
- Within Assemble Document, you insert Korean content into every box that contains French.
- Within the Q&A, you add a language swap from French to Korean.
As soon as you add a language swap, the Q&A will treat French as Korean towards the end-user. For example, when selecting the language of the document, the software will show “Korean” instead of French. In addition, the resulting DOCX file will be set to Korean instead of French (to avoid that Word would flag incorrect spelling).
Obviously, this is a stop gap solution that should not be used too widely. Please note the following limitations:
- The swapping is limited to the Q&A environment. Assemble Document (and the clause editor) will not be aware of any swapping taking place. So as a clause/document author, you will see French everywhere, instead of Korean.
- Searching on Korean content will be difficult. For most supported languages, ClauseBase will apply its grammatical understanding of words, so that even when you search a word in singular, it will also show results containing that word in plural. Obviously, the performance of the search system will be less for Korean content inserted into French language boxes.
- The Q&A interface (e.g., the “…” dropdown menu in the top right, as well as certain error messages) will not be translated into Korean. Instead, they will be shown in English.