Template documents

What are template documents?

Template documents are:

Word documents used as the basis for the document-creation action by the document generator in the system, with or without electronic signing:
Completely regular Word documents, in which parts of “variable text” were replaced with simple textual “placeholders”, so that it will be possible to “generate” Word/PDF documents from the templates again and again by “merging” the information from records. If you want to use them for electronic signatures – you can also add placeholders for the signatures themselves…

Since the sentence above is a bit complicated, allow us to elaborate with an example, so that you understand…:

Say you want to use DocsRobot in order to allow your employees to “submit”, again and again, documents of the same type, of a “health declaration”, and even ask them to sign each of these upon submission…
So first, you prepare a Word document of a “health declaration” and convert it into a “template document” by replacing all the data that varies from submission to submission – the employee name, submission date, and whatever is needed – with the appropriate “placeholders”…
Second, you define in DocsRobot a “form type” and with it a “digital form” named “health declaration” – and to the form you attach the template document you created…
After that, every employee who needs to submit a health declaration will enter the form you defined in the stage mentioned above, in which they can fill in the details [employee name] and [submission date], and with one more button click – produce the document and continue to its signing process (from an email that will arrive to them).
From this moment on, each employee will be able to see all their health declarations from the main screen “health declarations”. Their manager will also be able to see their health declarations, but other employees will not be able to…

“Template documents” are no different from any regular Word document – you do not prepare them in a way different from preparing a regular Word document, you do not need to give them a different file extension, nothing – just prepare them and save them in a completely regular way…
What do you create a new template document from? You can begin preparing a “template document” from a document that has “lines” for the information that needs to be merged, as in “I, the undersigned ___________ hereby declare that on ___________ I ate borekas”; and you replace that with “I, the undersigned {{employee_name}} hereby declare that on {{declaration_date}} I ate borekas” You can also begin preparing a “template document” from a “clean” document, and add the placeholders to it as needed…
What names should you put in the “placeholders”? Very simple – you take the names of the fields you added to the matching digital form. Detailed instructions for this are in a separate help article appearing below…
Can you create template documents with tables? Yes. Simply create a table in Word, leave headers for the columns in the first row, and in the second row add the placeholders with the names of the fields you created in the table in the electronic form. Detailed instructions for this are in a separate help article appearing below…