I wanted to talk about where the various information that ends up in a finished document comes from. So if you imagine your finished document, not the form that the user, sees when they are filling in the questionnaire, but the actual finished product and you think about the fact that all of this information is coming from a variety of sources, and all being assembled into a finished product. I wanted to talk about those various sources and how you decide which words belong in which source so that they can all be assembled together into a sensible product at the end.

So to do that, we are let's first talk about the sources. There's I've got four sources here, five depending on how you count it.

First off, there's the actual body of the form, just the text, the paragraphs, and headings, and headers, and footers in that are in the body of the form. What would be the top part of our form, the everything above the questionnaire?

Then you've got the information that gets typed into the questionnaire. That's information that the form user types in response to answers in response to questions in the q and a table and also as they fill in any grids that the form author has added under that table.

Then you've got information in, folios. If you're using DocsRi, you might be using folios, that include text and graphics and other material.

And then you've got master lists both in, the form tool and in Docsara, where you can store tables of information that can be pulled into that finished document.

So as you're creating forms, you need to have a a a good conceptual framework of how all these different sources differ from each other. Why is it better to put a piece of information in one place than another place?

And there's often several approaches that you can take in any particular circumstance.

So this is our who puts what, where, when, and why chart, and I'm gonna just run through this.

First, I'm gonna hide part of it so that we can just address a a piece at a time.

So the first, the, the four the four locations, the questionnaire being subdivided into the q and a table and any grids that are underneath it. That's our our potential places where we're gonna be putting stuff.

And one consideration about what goes where is when the information is available.

If the information is something that's known days in advance at the time that the form is created, that's symbolized with this little calendar icon. If the information is only known right at the minute that the form is used, and that's symbolized with the little clock icon, the form author should be providing all of the information that's available in advance.

The form user needs to provide any information that was not known in advance, and that information, the template I'll get I'll cover this template one last because that's a special case. But any information that's gonna be typed into the questionnaire is information that's known by the user at the time the form is used. So that information go belongs there. Any information that's known ahead of time can be typed into a folio or into a master list by the form author.

And the reason the template, the form body is subdivided into here is because sometimes you the form author will generally type most of that, information that's known ahead of time into the form body. But there's also maybe some information that is typed into the template by the form user, And the most typical example of this is when, the form user uses the form to produce the finished document, and then they go through that and make their own revisions to that finished product before they print it out.

So they might just scan through and say, oh, I'd really like to use some other language here, and they can actually type their own information into the body of the form themselves.

So the template ends in the finished product, The form body ends up being composed both of information that was typed in by the form author and by the form user.

Our next line here is who, and that's talking about the same thing, the form author symbolized by the little scholars hat here. The form author is gonna be, typing information into the template along with the form user with the construction hat here.

Might also add some information there. The form user is exclusively responsible for filling in the questionnaire and any grids, and the form author is exclusively responsible for typing information into the folio in the master list.

Next, we have what what sort of information can be put in each one of these places?

The infinity symbol here means you can put anything at all, graphics, footnotes, hyperlinks, all kinds of fancy formatting.

Anything at all can be put into the body of the the form, into the template itself.

The responses in the questionnaire can only be textual responses.

As the form user is filling in the questionnaire, they couldn't, for example, put in a picture of a dog. They couldn't put in a hyperlink. They couldn't add a footnote.

They can't do any of that elaborate stuff within the questionnaire.

In the external, information, folios and master lists, you can put anything in a folio, hyperlinks, footnotes, etcetera, and you can only put text in a master list. So if you're, thinking about where you're gonna put these, footnotes or these hyperlinks, there's really only two places that you could go. You either have to type it into the body of the form or into a folio and then have that passage inserted into the finished product.

And then next, we have the most interesting section of this thing is the bottom half is the why. Why would you decide to put something in one place over another place?

And here there's several different considerations.

First consideration, is it lots of text?

If you have pages and pages of information, the best place to put that is gonna be in these gold star slots either in the template itself or in a folio, passages in a folio, and they'll be inserted from there. The silver star here, for a master list means the master list could also be a reasonable repository for masses of text, but it's gonna be easier to edit and deal with. And if there's that much text, chances are good that it's gonna need some internal formatting, maybe a little underlining or something. So the master list, is is a more limited place that that you potentially could put lots and lots of text.

The questionnaire, yes, you could do it, but it's really not a very good place for it. You don't want to ask a form user to type, you know, a page of information into the questionnaire in response to a question. If you have a part of your form that calls for paragraphs to be drafted by the form user, I wouldn't ask them to type that into the questionnaire. Instead, I would put in a, attention, an an attention mark with this button right here, which which just requests the user to type in whatever information is needed at that location in the finished document.

Next consideration is lots of items.

Are there a whole lot is there a long series of items involved, maybe twenty or thirty shareholders or fifty items from the catalog that are being or ordered, just a a long series of items.

If there is, then the body of the form is an excellent place to put that information if you know it in advance.

If you need to, have the form user enter it, you can put it in the q and a table.

That would work. The grid is generally gonna be a better choice if you're listing a bunch of shareholders, for example.

And if you need to know information related to each of those shareholders, then you definitely wanna go into a grid for that.

And, folios and master lists are just, that's their whole purpose, just long lists of information. So if it's possible to get those long lists of information into a folio or a master list, you definitely wanna shoot for that. That's an excellent place for that type of information.

Next consideration here, related information.

What I mean by that is, do you have, two pieces of information that need to be related to each other, so that one refers to the other. For example, maybe you've got a document which asks the form user to choose a person, and at one point in the document, you need to put in the person's name, and then halfway through, you need to plug in the email address. And then further along, you need to plug in that person's phone number. And all of those different pieces of information that appear at different places in the finished document are related to each other, and they're all determined by that one selection of the person's name.

So if you have related information like that, the red x here means you cannot form that relationship within the body of the template.

If you have a a form, like the one I just described and you've got the name John Doe up at the top and the phone number down in the middle and the email address down at the bottom, the the form is is not smart enough to know that those three pieces of information are related to each other.

But if you put it in the questionnaire or in an external document, you can relate that information.

In the questionnaire, you would do it with a linked answer.

If you go into your smart answer screen there, you'll see a linked answers option to tie information together. But the best place for that sort of information is in grids. Because of their tabular format, information is automatically relational in, in that grid. If you type something in the left column, then the items in that same row in the second and third and fourth columns are related to that item in the left column so that you can put someone's name in one place and their email address in another place, and it all gets tied together very nicely. So grids are optimal for that.

In folios, relational information, can be done. It's not as easy as it is in a master list. But in a folio, you can use what's called folio facts to put related information about particular passages in a folio.

If you've gone through the workbooks on folios, the example in there was talking about serving sizes for various recipes.

The folio contained a a list of recipes, and then there was some extra information about each recipe, which was contained in a folio fact.

But the real prize winner for relational information is master lists.

That would be something like a list of all the people in your office along with all of their phone numbers, and email addresses.

And it's very easy to work with.

Very easy to form those relationships in a master list. Next, consideration is I think we just have two left here, maybe three.

Searchable. Does the information need to be searchable?

In the body of the form, yes. You can use words, search features to find something, but that's not really the type of searching I'm talking about. I'm talking more about when a form user is, finding information that they have an inkling of, but they don't know specifically.

And in for example, in the questionnaire, they might know that they need to type in the name of someone in the northwest region of the office, but they don't know who it is.

The q and a table can provide sort of a limited form of searching in that the form author can put in drop down lists so that they can at least see a listing of all those people and choose one of them. That goes for the grid as well.

But the best sort of searching is available in folios, and that is because folios allow for tagging, and they also allow for full text searching. Suppose, for example, that I have a folio, that contains case information.

I'm working in a law office, and I have a bunch of, different cases logged into a folio. Some of the cases are related to personal injury. Some are related to real estate. Some are related to corporate formation.

And I've, put in information about each of those cases, and I've gone through and I've tagged those, passages in the folio with various tags so that when I go to look for a particular case, I can bring up listings of only the cases related to, personal injury, or I can do full text searching. If I remember there was a case that, involved a a property line dispute with a brown fence, then I could type in the word brown and bring up a listing of only the passages that contain that word somewhere within their contents.

It's just really excellent searching within folios, for information.

And then finally, searching in master list, it it just can't be done. The master list is outside of the word interface that the form user is seeing, and so they can't even use words built in tools to search it.

It's just a reference place.

Then next up is second to last, used in many forms. Is this language that you're considering where to store it, is this language used in multiple forms, or is it only used in this particular form that you're working on right now?

If it's used in multiple forms, the best place to put it is in a master list or a folio.

Two examples. Suppose you have an acknowledgment block or a notary block, that's a frequent one, which is identical across dozens or even hundreds of forms in your office. It just appears over and over again. It's used all the time.

That would be an excellent item to put out in a folio because then, next year, if your company decides that all of your notary, blocks ought to, the language and them ought to be changed a little bit, you can go to that folio and make that change in language in one place. And because that language is pulled from the folio into each of those dozens of different forms, every time the form is used, all of those dozens of forms are gonna be updated automatically just by virtue of you having made the change in one place.

Some offices have a letterhead that includes the names of the partners, and those names change every once in a while.

That's another great use for a a folio passage.

You put that that section of your letterhead into a folio passage.

And then in all of your forms that are letters, again, there might be hundreds of them, instead of listing all those people's names in each form, you just have a reference to that passage in your folio.

And so it'll get updated in all of those forms every time you make a single, revision to your folio.

And then over here in the master list column, I mentioned already, the typical one on this would be a a list of employees in your office along with their names and and phone numbers.

And then every time you add a new employee, you can just, make an addition to your master list of employees, and then any form that refers to that master list is gonna automatically be updated with the new employee name available.

So, the last one here is saved in a client file. If the information is particular to a client or matter, a particular use of a form, then it has to go in the questionnaire if you want it to get saved into the answer file. And I'm talking about the file that gets created when you use when you use the save load button up here so that you can fill in the information on one form, save that information for future use, and then load it into another form that asks the same questions.

Any information that you wanna be able to reuse like that, particular to a client or matter, but used across multiple forms, you know, that information has to go into the questionnaire so that it can get saved in that file.

So looking this over, ought to give you ideas about why you would want to put various things in various places.

You could take a screenshot of this, or I think this might even be available on our website.