This guide includes best practices for using the Propdocs document editor to be the most efficient when drafting and negotiating your deal documents. Our document editor is where you’ll spend a lot of your time in Propdocs, including drafting documents, collaborating with your team, and negotiating with your counterparties.
Edit and Compare
At the top left of the page, you can toggle between Edit and Compare modes, with the latter displaying a complete history of all versions of the document showing all changes made (much like MS Word). We automatically create versions at key points in the document lifecycle, such as approvals, change of possession, and when it’s finalized for signing. We recommend using Compare when you’re interested in reviewing any/all changes made to a document throughout the deal process.
Toolbar
The document editor’s toolbar is similar to toolbars you may be familiar with from MS Word, Google Docs, etc. You can style text (size, underline, bold, etc), create numbered lists and bullets, insert tables and images, add page breaks, set alignment and set indentations all from the toolbar. The toolbar has more advanced features like tracking changes, public and private comments, and editing the headers/footers, which are covered in more depth in their respective support articles.
Save Versions
In the toolbar, you’ll note a Save icon (the trusty ol’ floppy disk!). This is for when you may need to explicitly save and name a specific version of your document. Note that the document autosaves, so saving your document is NOT what this button is for. We recommend using the Save Version button whenever you find it important to save a revision of your document, which you can revert back to if need be in the future. Here’s an example of when versions are helpful:
1. You initially draft a contract. Now you want to send it to your manager for their review before you send it off to the counterparty. You can click Revision History and name the current revision V1, and then send the document for internal review.
2. When your manager makes changes in Propdocs, they will be working on a new version of the document. When completed, you’ll easily be able to compare their revision with the initial document you sent to them and revert to the previous version if needed.
3. Moving forward to negotiating with the counterparty, you can similarly create versions when it makes the most sense for you and your team.
Track Changes
Track Changes is a powerful tool and one that you’re almost certainly familiar with. For best practice, we recommend only toggling on Track Changes when your edits are suggestions that you’ll want either your team members or your counterparty to accept. For initial contract drafting, enabling Track Changes might not make sense as you’re creating the baseline document which will be reviewed by your team and/or your counterparty, and therefore you aren’t seeking approval of the changes you’re making. However, if you’re unsure about a provision you drafted and want to draw attention to it for your team and/or counterparty, using Track Changes will create your change as a ‘New Suggestion’ that needs to be Accepted.
Note, once you’ve sent your document to your counterparty, Track Changes is ALWAYS enabled. This allows for transparency between parties throughout the negotiation process.
Inserting information into ‘Fields’
When your document appears to have field sections (i.e. examples of these include "_______", "[ ]", and "XXXXX" ), they are merely placeholders. As a best practice, the easiest way to replace these sections with text is to double click them (to highlight), and then type your entry to replace it.
Comments
Comments are incredibly valuable when editing your document in Propdocs. They can draw attention to particular text and drive discussion between you, your team, and your counterparty. They can also act as notes that live within the document forever that you can reference in the future. We recommend using this feature often as it helps to centralize decision-making for transparency and a more robust audit trail (as opposed to these decisions getting lost in email threads, texts, calls, and pdf annotations).
Here are a few tips:
- Add Comment: The quickest way to add a comment is by highlighting the text that you want to comment on. Doing so will bring up the two comment icons, public and private.
- Public Comments: Use this for any comments that you want everybody who has access to the document to see, including counterparties, and your team members.
- Private Comments: These are for comments you only want your internal deal team to see. For example, discussing strategy during the negotiation process to make decisions on what to include in a contract.
- Mentions: Similar to many other solutions (and social media platforms) you can @mention individuals in comments to explicitly notify and associate a comment to a call to action for that specific person. This is simply done by typing ‘@’ and selecting the person you want to mention.