Once you have created a Word document, you will see the following ribbon in Word:
This ribbon is designed to help you work smoothly by remaining on this ribbon for most basic and day-to-day Word tasks. You can always switch ribbon to one of the regular Word ribbons at any time. primedocs does not limit you in any way, or block you from using advanced Word functionality - it merely offers you an alternative for regular, everyday Word editing.
So let’s look at this ribbon starting on the left.
The primedocs icon will lead you to the help area, which includes this document.
“Save” is clear - it corresponds to Word’s “Save”.
Now the first unique button is “Properties”. This opens the document properties window. These properties are the primedocs properties, not Word’s or Window’s properties, which are generally technical in nature. primedoc’s properties are those fields you fill in during the document creation process. They are those fields on the window that pops up after you open a template and before it appears in Word. So for a letter, this popup window may ask you for the recipient’s address, the date, the subject line and if you have any enclosures. These the the document properties, and this button in the Word ribbon simply opens up this exact same popup window again, so that you can change any choices you may have made when you created the document originally. This is a really easy way to change document information, rather than going and editing it all by hand in the document.
The next button (with my name on it) is the profile selection button, so yes - you can change user profile even on an existing document. If this button is greyed out, it simply means that the particular type of document you have open doesn’t use the user profile information.
And directly below the profile selection button, you have the language selection button. This doesn’t actually translate the document (this would be technically possible nowadays, but the quality of the translation is not reliable enough… yet). Instead, it switches the spell check language of the entire document to the language you select.
Snippets are a very powerful feature - so let’s take a moment to get to know them a little better:
Snippets are blocks of content (text, tables, images, etc.) which you save and can re-use in any other document, without havoing to copy and paste from other documents. They are very easy to create and to work with. And if you use them cleverly, they can save you an enormous amount of time!
There are basically two types of snippets: “Shared” and “Personal” snippets. Everyone can create personal snippets. They are yours and yours alone. Nobody else can see them (not even admins). Shared snippets are created centrally and are made available to everyone or to specific teams within your organisation. If you need to be able to create shared snippets, there is training especially available for this - it’s not hard. But you will need to request “Snippet” access rights tpo primedocs Pro.
So how do you create a snippet. Easy. Mark text and drag it into the area on the right, e.g. under “Personal snippets”. Then drop it there. A window will pop up asking for the name of the snippet and listing the language Word has recognised. Press OK and the snippet is saved.
To use this snippet at a later date in another (or of course the same document), simply drag the snippet out of the snippt panel into your document. That’s all there is to it.
There are some advanced features such as the ability to overlay different language versions of the same snippet by marking a text in, say, French and dropping it on top of the same snippet in English… and primedocs will save each language version in the same snippet. Then, you can dsrag the snippet into a document and primedocs will atuomatically add the correct language version (assuming the spell check language of the document is set correctly). Or you can right-click on the snippet and choose which language version to insert. If you do this, the snippet will be added to where the cursor is in the document.
Snippets also play a central role in document automation, but that’s a story for another time, in Layouter training.
Back to our ribbon. Here it is again, so you don’t have to scroll to the top of the page.
Just beside the Snippets button, we have three Colour-management buttons, for Fill, Line and Text colours separately. These allow you to select precisely the colours you need, and the three dropdowns ensure that you always have the coorect colours and colour tones for each specific purpose.
The next section, entitled “Format” corresponds to Word’s text formatting section, so we won’t go into it in detail here. It lets you choose fonts, indenting, text alignment and so on. “Standard” reverts back to the base formatting.
And then we have “Print”, which of course opens the print dialogue. This has the same function as the keyboard combination Crtl + P.
The “Send” button is really neat: it opens an e-mail with the currently-open Word document already inserted as an attachment, which makes it very smooth to send a document to a colleague.
Last but not least, the “Spelling” button triggers a spell check runthrough.