Updates and Upgrades Archives | TheFormTool

An Upgrade for Doxserá and Doxserá DB: Custom Hotkeys

The Team at TheFormTool — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 22:47:49 +0000

The majority of our customers are happiest using a combination of menus and keystrokes, but “power users”, especially the very fastest, prefer hotkeys to do as much as possible while concentrating solely on the keyboard. Our friends at Affinity Consulting are a perfect example; with more than 20 years’ experience, they’re comfortable doing as much as possible using keystrokes for commands whenever possible.

This creates a real conundrum: dozens of keystrokes and hotkeys are already reserved, many by Word itself. And almost everyone has an opinion on what’s absolutely essential versus completely unneeded.

TheFormTool’s crackerjack tech team accepted the challenge to satisfy everyone while disappointing none and they’ve created the perfect solution. First, they added macros for 70 of our programs’ commands. Then they made those names assignable in Word’s Customization feature, either with a new keystroke or by reassigning an old one already in use but unappreciated.

The bottom line: users can completely personalize as many keyboard commands for Doxserá and Doxserá DB as they wish and enjoy even greater speed and comfort. Or not.

If you’re a power user or a wannabe, we invite you to give the new Custom Hotkeys feature a try. Complete instructions are available in our online Knowledge Base at TLC 7 Creating Custom Hotkeys.

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Goodbye Microsoft Clipboard

The Team at TheFormTool — Sat, 02 Jun 2018 17:30:27 +0000

Microsoft Word is a huge program seemingly offering something for everyone and every circumstance. It has grown so large, in fact, that we believe it is becoming musclebound, less able to perform basic functions even as its features list grows.

Six months ago we began collecting reports of infrequent and seemingly random failures affecting a few of the largest and most complex forms in use by a handful of our most sophisticated customers. Four months of investigations produced little other than confirmation a problem exists that produces a completely useless runtime error about 10% of the time on a susceptible form.

The Clipboard is the culprit

A user’s casual comment that the problem seemed to happen more often during multitasking, when she was also copying the content of Outlook messages, eventually led us to conclude that Word is unable to consistently keep up with the pace of its own high speed document processing. Simply put, Word’s in-and-out interchanges with the Windows Clipboard can freeze, jamming Word at erratic intervals.

We believe this problem will get worse with time, gradually affecting more and more of Word’s work and the customers around the world who depend on Word for their livelihoods. We wanted a solution, not just for the handfuls of our most sophisticated customers affected today but for all who will be exposed in the future.

Two months of experimentation and repeated false starts through the fall yielded a winning discovery that our amazing technical staff exploited to create a solution that completely removes the Windows Clipboard from use by our programs.

There is a very slight speed increase with the change, but the main advantage is increased program stability and fewer experiences with otherwise unexplainable and apparently unrelated processing interruptions.

We urge all users to update to the newest version of their program, available now. And we congratulate our Technical Operations crew for their tenacity, superb detective work, and crackerjack programming.

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Sets Feature Adds Automatic PDF Feature

The Team at TheFormTool — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 18:14:44 +0000

A Wisconsin small firm owner who uses more than 300 intelligent forms in her business suggested we add an option for a user to select the automatic creation of PDFs when Petrifying a Set of forms. Emily was familiar with Word’s own ability to Save a document in PDF, but liked the idea of saving a click or two while creating catalogs.

It’s a great idea, and it’s been incorporated into current versions of both Doxserá^® and Doxserá DB^®.

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Eight ways to stay up to date with new items at TheFormTool, LLC

The Team at TheFormTool — Fri, 12 Aug 2016 22:29:18 +0000

News happens in real time. Here’s how to stay informed without being overwhelmed

Thanks to our enthusiastic customers, now representing more than 40 countries and more than 200 truly fascinating industries, there seems to be something new to share almost weekly. Recently, merely keeping up with it all has been a royal chore, with hundreds of features and functions spread across a handful of products, all matched by “how-to” ideas contributed by thousands of customers.

We pride ourselves on producing the easiest to use and most powerful document assembly and automation software in the world. In recent months we’ve turned a bit of that ingenuity and energy toward providing our users with more of the information they need, faster and easier.

We’re creating specific channels of information to inform users of specific changes, such when we release an update, or create a new subject-specific video, or even a “heads up” on upcoming discussion items for the live weekly The Learning Curve podcast.

The main website (www.theformtool.com) will continue to anchor our efforts, ably supplemented with the online Knowledge Base, the amazing online training course (the video version of The Learning Curve), the Word Warrior monthly newsletter (subscribe here), Twitter (@theformtool) and this blog. We’re going to make each of those channels more specific to your interests.

Here are two very specific action items.

You can now receive real time notifications of posts such as this one, or the recent discussions of how to connect Dox DB to MySQL, the very first announcement of Dox DB 2.0, notice of a fix for a troubling bug, and the story of four early adopters of our software. This blog is now publishing RSS feeds in real time that you can access through your news feed or RSS reader just by selecting www.theformtool.com as a feed. If you don’t already have an RSS reader, we suggest you look at feedly.com. Feedly is free and easy. and a great tool. Open an account and then select www.theformtool.com as one of your interests. Check in with feedly as often as you wish to catch summaries of and links to any new items.

If you’d like to be notified as updates become available for your program, subscribe to the article Current Version Numbers of TheFormTool Products, either with an RSS feed or by registering with the Service Center and requesting email updates (by subscribing) to just this one area.

Either way, you’ll be up to date with the latest news of most importance to you, in real time.

And, you’ll learn what more we have in store as its announced in coming weeks.

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We recommend you update to correct a significant bug

The Team at TheFormTool — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 18:51:41 +0000

We’ve discovered a significant bug that was inadvertently introduced in versions 3.0 of TheFormTool PRO and Doxserá^®. This bug causes Singular/Plural Fields that are based on Smart Answers that include Text With Pronoun ansers to produce incorrect results. We recommend that all users update their copies of TheFormTool PRO and Doxserá^® as soon as possible.

You can download the current version of your software by clicking on the Products or Support menus, selecting Downloads, then clicking on your product.

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Doxserá® DB: Stories of Four Early Adopters

The Team at TheFormTool — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 22:34:27 +0000

We’re always amazed at the imaginative uses customers find for our software, thousands of great ideas we never envisioned, with more developed every day.

We thought you might be interested in what four early adopters are planning with Doxserá^® DB:

Mergers and Acquisitions. A lawyer specializing in large transactions has already used a beta version of Doxserá^® DB to create final documents directly from the due diligence spreadsheets of asset descriptions. The task was to include language for hundreds of similar but not identical high-value assets governed by multiple jurisdictions, held in diverse forms of ownership, and subject to a variety of financings. Doxserá^® DB saved months of work, hundreds of hours, and almost unlimited opportunities for errors. In its initial uses, the resulting nearly 2,000 transactional documents required only a single printing.

Annual documents. A lawyer who prepares annual documents for client firms, often as a courtesy, will save nearly two hours for each client’s firms and eliminate errors by using Doxserá^® DB to link data from multiple Excel files in several locations to customize each document. One spreadsheet contains the static data for each company, such as its form, address, state registration number, name and address of registered agent, formation date, and similar items. A second spreadsheet lists ownership information, including types and numbers of shares or units and the like. A third sheet lists director data, while the fourth file lists potentially reportable changes or events that occurred during the period. With Doxserá^® DB, minutes, annual reports, state filings and similar documents can be created in seconds and proofed in minutes. The result will convert a “loss leader” into better, and highly profitable, client service.

Real Estate Appraisals. A commercial real estate appraiser stores his neighborhood and listing-specific data in Excel spreadsheets. He’ll use Doxserá^® DB to link specific neighborhood data to the listing location in order to speed the drafting process and reduce errors. The forms will use the same property ID information for DB’s Passages feature to populate the appraisal with related maps, charts and graphics for the listed property.

Insurance Policies. A major commercial and industrial insurer will use Doxserá^® DB to link client data to industry-specific underwriting standards in order to allow the document to decide what text to include for the appropriate coverages. The result will be thousands of customized and concise insurance policies that avoid the legacy practice of using schedules to substantially modify base policy forms. The result is more readable and better-constructed policies custom fitted for each insurance customer.

You already have the data. Doxserá^® DB gives you the answer. Whatever the question.

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The “Perfect” Age in version 3.1

The Team at TheFormTool — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:32:03 +0000

One of the most popular requests for new features for our software over the past year has been to include the automated computation of a truly accurate age, the age of a person, a building, a bottle of wine.

TheFormTool PRO and Doxserá have always been capable of computing the passage of time with perfect accuracy, but doing so required some detailed work by the form author; the more accuracy desired, the more time required to program.

Now, in versions 3.1 of PRO and Dox, the programs include a new “Age” function in their Math menus. Determining age is just a matter of imputing the birth or start date, then the current or ending date. Click “Fill” and you’re set. As you’d expect, the computation is completely accurate and can display in any number and type format.

The Perfect Age is one more step in our constant effort to make software both easier to use and more powerful.

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Introducing Versions 3.0

The Team at TheFormTool — Tue, 22 Mar 2016 22:42:56 +0000

The improvements to both TheFormTool PRO and to Doxserá® are so large that we decided they should for first time bear the same version number.

It’s a pleasure to introduce versions 3.0

The changes include:

An 80% increase in speed
Six interface improvements
Five feature enhancements
And four major new features:
- Derived Series Answers, with sorting, to act as “baskets” for diverse data
- Label Reports to test, organize and standardize Labels across Questionnaires and forms (Dox only)
- List Layers to allow Lists to use subordinate and cross-relational data within dependent Lists
- The ability to license your company by machine or by user (Dox only)

Here is a video tour of the changes:

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Doxserá v3.0 Ships to Beta Testers

The Team at TheFormTool — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 17:06:26 +0000

This morning we shipped Doxserá v3.0b1 to our outside beta test volunteers, a group of our most experienced and innovative Doxserá owners. Nearly a year in development, Doxserá 3.0 introduces almost three dozen enhancements and new features and an 80{9e5c399d4686ffbee71f542e7a95a67178027d042b67cd6e8c3b22a26beb12ba} speed increase. We look forward to their reports.

As has been our custom, Dox 3.0 will be a free update to current owners.

You can see a demonstration at https://theformtool.wp.urdemo.website/this-is-new/

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New Feature: Complete Metadata Scrubbing

The Team at TheFormTool — Sun, 28 Jun 2015 23:31:00 +0000

Metadata is information Word implants in every document to illustrate its origin and illuminate its change history. Current metadata includes any and all comments, document properties (including author history), email headers, annotations, track changes revisions, and routing slips. There are occasions where metadata can be helpful, but more often than not the existence of metadata files on a document being distributed is the beginning of a disaster. Jim Calloway, an early and prescient muse on metadata, in 2009 used an example where an embedded comment was included in a document sent to the opposing party. The comment, “Notes. Client is desperate to recover something and not face the PR disaster of receiving nothing at trial. Offer $100K. But get it settled before end of month even if we have to take half that.”

The ethics committees of 14 bar associations have weighed in so far, most placing varying emphasis on the need for the originating attorney to make certain that metadata has been removed prior to distribution or filing. The Florida Courts Technology Commission has told attorneys they are responsible for stripping all the metadata from e-filed documents to protect their clients’ confidential personal information. Court clerks have gone further, submitting a proposal to require attorneys to indemnify them for any damages resulting from the inclusion of metadata in files documents.

Donna Marino, with The Florida Bar Foundation, suggested at The Florida Bar 2015 Convention that we take our metadata scrubbing efforts an extra step. TheFormTool PRO and Doxserá already scrub all of their metadata when documents are Petrified prior to distribution. Donna asked whether we could expand the function to include ALL metadata. We listened to Donna and did just that. TheFormTool PRO v2.9b and Doxserá 2.3b, at the user’s option, will remove all metadata automatically and transparently from documents they create. Here’s how.

On the menu bar, select Options>Metadata scrubbing. When offered the option to turn metadata scrubbing On, click Yes. From that point on, all metadata in intelligent documents created on this machine will be automatically scrubbed during Petrification.

The process can be reversed just as easily.

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