And I think of these as building blocks.

There's there's different elements that can be brought in and used as needed.

You start with a form, which consists of the body of the the document and then the questionnaire at the bottom where, information is gathered from the form user. And this is all self contained and completely functional just like that. You don't have to add anything to it.

And then, of course, you'll be creating multiple forms, and so you'll end up storing them somewhere, perhaps on your server, or they can be stored on your own computer or in the cloud. So you've got all these forms, all over the place, each one of them, an independent, fully functional unit all by itself.

And then you start thinking about, how to how to get more out of it, how to leverage it more. The first thing I think people get into is saved answers.

That means that the information that was typed into the questionnaire there gets saved some place outside of the form, and the program takes care of where it gets saved. You don't have to worry about that. But now you've got information that actually exists outside of these forms. So I might save, answers for my Smith client in an answer file named Smith and answers for my Jones client in an answer file named Jones.

And then tomorrow when I'm doing another form for mister Smith, I can load in some answers from my Smith answer file. Perhaps not all of the answers, but but at least some of the answers, mister Smith's name and address and phone number, are common between those two forms, and so I don't have to do, any retyping.

And then as I accumulate more and more answers over time by filling in various forms, my answer file for mister Smith grows until eventually I'm filling an entire form for mister Smith without having to type anything at all.

Then, you'll get a little more sophisticated, and add grids into your form. A grid appears underneath the questionnaire. You can add or it's it's a part of the questionnaire, but it appears at the bottom of the questionnaire.

And you can have even multiple grids in a single form. Grids are nice for arranging, related information. If you're asking for a list of people and for each person, you want that person's, name, address, email, phone number.

That is relational information. The names the the email column is related to the name column, And so you'd think of arranging that information in a spreadsheet sort of an arrangement, and grids are a great way to enter that kind of information. The answers in the grids are also saved into those answer files so that you don't have to do any retyping on that information either.

Then you've now got some questionnaires that are getting getting fairly elaborate.

So as a form author, you might wanna start saving your questionnaires.

We talked about saved answers.

That's what form users are doing. Form users are filling in the answers to their questionnaires and saving those answers for future use in other form.

Form authors are creating entire questionnaires and then thinking, hey. This is a great questionnaire.

I might create another form in the future, and it's gonna need another questionnaire that's gonna be very similar to this one. So I'm gonna save this questionnaire for future use in other forms that I might create at some future date. So that's what saved questionnaires are. And, again, those are saved external to any form. They're out in their own space that's managed by the program, so that they can be used across the board in various forms.

Then let's talk about sources.

Sources are, places where we put information that is then accessible to all the forms we create. We don't have to use it in any given form, but any given form can use information from any of these sources.

The first one is an internal source. That means, it's created and managed within the FormTool or Docsara program.

And the first one you're likely to use is a master list. All three products, the FormTool Pro, Docsara, and Docsara DB are able to store and retrieve information in a master list. And you can think of it sort of as an Excel spreadsheet.

It's the information is entered, via a word table, and then it's accessed by all of your forms. A really good sort of information.

And since, another topic for us today is how different sources should be used for different sorts of information. I'm gonna go ahead and talk about that here while we're looking at this chart.

A master list is a really good place for simple two dimensional information that doesn't change very often.

My primary go to example for this is an employee list. If I've got a company that has a number of employees and they're generating, say, letters, and they need to sign their letters.

Some of them are generating letters for others of them, so they need the capability to sign those letters with someone else's name. And perhaps the signatures include email addresses and direct dial numbers and so forth. All of that sort of tabular information, names, email addresses, phone numbers, and so forth, can be saved in a master list, a two dimensional Excel spreadsheet looking sort of a thing, where I've got my names in one column and my phone numbers in another column and my email addresses in in another column. And then all of the letter forms that I create or any form that refers to numbers of my organization, whether they're listings or whether I'm choosing one from many, all of those forms can pull that information straight from that master list.

Then when, the number of employees changes in my company, maybe I hire someone new today, I just go to my master list. I add one more row to my little table there of employees, and all of the forms that I have already created in the past immediately have access to that new information, whether it's to select a person to sign a letter or maybe to generate a report of all my employees.

That information is all up to date with every change that I make to my master list, no matter how many different forms use that information.

I said basic simple information because master lists can only contain plain text.

They can't include formatting, graphics, footnotes, hyperlinks, things like that. It's just plain straight information.

Then jumping back over here onto the left side. Around this time in your progression with the form tool, you might, decide to get in to move from the Form Tool Pro into Docsara, which has access to form sets.

Form sets are listings of forms.

Each form set is a list of related forms.

The forms can exist in various locations.

A single form set list can include forms from your computer, from the cloud, from the server, from various folders in each one of those places, from various drives on your network.

Each form set compiles a list of a collection of related forms.

It does that so that you can then or so that form users can then choose a form set and select any number of forms within that set to produce simultaneously.

What happens is the program, say say I'm a form user and I choose, three forms that I want to produce for a particular client. I need a cover letter, and I need maybe a will and a trust, and, some kind of a summary sheet, four different documents that I'm producing, four different forms, all for the same client.

I can produce those simultaneously.

So what happens is the program goes out, looks at the questionnaires of each of those four forms, builds a compiled questionnaire that includes all of the necessary questions respond to all four forms with no duplication and then presents that compiled questionnaire to me for filling in. I fill it in either by hand or by loading in answers that I've saved previously. And then when I click the fill button, that master combined And then when I click the fill button, that master compiled questionnaire is used to produce four separate finished documents all in one go.

So really a a great time saver for people who are producing batches of documents.

That's Form Sets.

Next, let's talk about another internal source.

This is, again, an internal source. It's a source that is created and managed within the form tool program.

This one is folios. Folios are available for Doxera and Doxera DB users, and they are collections of passages. A passage is a block of text. That text can be formatted unlike a master list.

A folio does contain or can contain formatted text. So all sorts of margin and font formatting that can include, images, footnotes, hyperlinks, colors, bold, underline, anything you can do in a Word document. It can include tables even. Anything you can do in a Word document, you can include in a passage.

And a folio is sort of a library of passages, and then those passages are inserted when and where needed, either automatically or on demand within documents or finished form.

So it's a place to store, external blocks of information, for use in multiple forms. Typically, you would only put something in a folio if it gets used in more than one form.

If, you have a block of text that is sometimes used in form a and sometimes not used in form a, but it's never used in any other forms, that information you would typically put just within the form itself. But as soon as you have information that gets used in multiple forms, then that's a perfect candidate to move into a folio passage. That way, it only exists in one place.

If you ever need to go back and revise that information, you only have to make the revision in one place, and all of the forms that use that information are automatically upgraded and use the, the current information that exists in the folio.

Again, remember, this is stuff that exists outside of any form in its own space.

Next, we have wrappers.

Wrappers are sort of the opposite of folios.

Folios are, information that gets inserted into a form.

Wrappers, are places into which a form can be inserted.

The direction is different.

A wrapper is everything around a form.

It's the style of the document, all the styles that are contained in the document. It's the headers and footers.

It's the page size. It's all the sort of branding of a form. So I could have a form letter that says, dear so and so, blah blah blah signed by me, and I could apply one wrapper to it that makes it look very fancy, to send out to my posh clients.

And then I could, the next time I use it, I could ply apply a different wrapper to it that looks very industrial and send it out to my industrial clients.

Anything I've got like catalog, perhaps perhaps I'm a a law firm that produces pleadings with a variety of different, firms or or I'm a service organization that produces pleadings for a variety of different law firms, I could have a different wrapper for each of my law firm clients.

And when I produce a document, I would just choose the appropriate wrapper, and so that pleading would be branded with that particular law firm's, logos, fonts, styles, and other information.

So wrappers control the appearance of the finished form, instead of the content of the finished form.

Then we have external sources.

External sources, exist outside of the DocsRAD or the FormTool programs.

They are only available to DocsRAD DB users, and the first one you're likely to use would be Outlook contacts. The form author can code a form in such a way that it asks for the user to select one or more contacts from their own from the set of contacts.

Keep in mind that the, form author is not making their own contacts accessible to form users.

Instead, the form is gonna, allow form users to leverage their own individual contacts, whether their own contacts are shared with other users or even if their own contacts exist only in their own computer.

So the form author makes the form reach into the form user's contact space and pull in names and addresses and phone numbers and so forth from those contacts.

Another external source is Excel spreadsheets.

Excel spreadsheets, are a good place to store information that that previously you might have put in a master list. Excel Excel spreadsheets are very similar to master lists in the sort of information that can be stored there.

Of course, the great benefit is that you may already have huge amounts of information that your company is is maintaining on a day to day basis in Excel spreadsheets.

Your form authors can now create forms that reach directly into those Excel spreadsheets wherever they may be.

You don't need to maintain an additional copy of that information anywhere. You just give your forms access to the information where it already lives, and the forms reach right in there and get current up to the minute data every time we use a form with, without having to do any, copying and pasting from Excel into Word to produce finished documents. The data is all live and accessible behind the scenes without the form users even being necessarily aware of where that information is coming from. The form author has set it up in advance so that the form is just presenting the user with particular choices.

The user makes choices, and the appropriate information is extracted from the appropriate Excel spreadsheet.

Any number of Excel spreadsheets can be accessed by any one form, unlike, merges you may have done with Word, where a form is a mail merge process where a form is tied to a particular Excel spreadsheet and that's it, with the form or with DocsR on DocsR IDB I'm sorry. Just with DocsR IDB, each form can be accessing information from a whole slew of Excel spreadsheets.

You can also, in the same form, access information from any number of Access databases and from any number of SQL databases.

Keep in mind, even though there's a a huge number of components here all working potentially working together even in a single form, you're they're just building blocks. You mix and match. You use the ones you need.

You ignore the ones you don't. And at the beginning of the process, just the form itself is enough to get you going and perhaps enough to keep you going for quite a while. It's only, as needs arise that you need to, get into these these extra building blocks to create more complicated structures.