Letters, proposals, legal documents—you work with so many of them for so many different occasions everyday. Now you can forget about individually crafting documents for every process, and save time by doing it just once. Let's dive deeper.
The Fillable Fields feature in Writer lets you insert editable fields to your documents and save them as templates. This way you can use the same template to create multiple contracts or proposals.
Say you're entering into a new deal with a few new partners. Any business deal would start with preparing and signing an NDA by all the partners. Instead of going through the trouble of creating a new NDA from scratch, you can use an existing NDA template and edit the fillable fields with information pertaining to the current deal.
Here's how you can easily create a fillable NDA template:
1. Prepare your NDA document.
2. Insert fillable fields for the variables that are likely to change from one deal to another (like Partner names, addresses etc).
To do this, go to More Options (☰) > Insert > Fillable Fields. Writer comes with popular preset fields like name, text boxes, drop down lists, email, phone, date, percent, currency, select boxes, and check boxes.
To insert fields that are not listed in Writer, for example Address, go to Single Line Text.
3. Now enter the field label name (in this case enter "Address") and other properties as required.
4. To insert signature fields, go to More Options (☰) > Insert > Signer Fields. Learn more about signature collection here.
5. After inserting the fillable fields, save the document as a template. To do this, go to File > Save as Template.
6. Give your template a name and click Save.
Your document will now be saved as a template.
7. To open your saved templates, go to Writer Home and click on Templates from the left panel.
8. All your saved templates will appear here. Choose the template you want to use(in this case, say you want to open the NDA template) and select it.
9. After the NDA template opens, click on the Use This Template option from the right side of the editor.
This way, the next time you enter into a business deal, you can use this same template and create a new NDA by tweaking the fillable fields to match your requirements.
Click here to learn more about using templates.
That's it for now. In next week's tip, we'll show you how to collaboratively fill template documents with your colleagues or clients.
Happy writing!