Using Word's Built-In Features to Create Fillable Forms and Templates

Hello, everyone. My name is Baron Henley. And this next presentation will be— it's a 2-hour deal. It's going to be chopped in the middle, I think, by lunch. But in any event, it's about better ways of drafting complex documents. In legal. And the first half is going to be just a general discussion of templates. And then we're going to jump into what Word is capable of natively to do some pretty cool automation. You're going to find— I'll just set the stage here. You're going to find that it's a little nerdy, maybe a lot nerdy, what I'm going to show you. But it's really powerful and it's free and it's built into every version of Word, Windows and Mac. I will also make available for you a little manual on how to do all the stuff that I'm going to be going over. So you don't have to like furiously take notes. You can always send me an email if you have questions about it. My email is on the screen now and it'll be on at the end. So I'll do a quick intro and we'll jump into this. My name is Baron. I went to Ohio State for undergrad and law school. I've been married 30 years. I have 3 adult daughters. There's all the women in my life. If you're wondering, even my dog is a girl, so I don't win any arguments and I'm constantly outnumbered. I'm a partner with Affinity Consulting. We help law firms and legal departments maximize technology and basically do everything except servers, networks, and eDiscovery. Everything else, we got you covered. I live in Columbus, Ohio. It looks like that. Capital of Ohio, right in the middle, and about 2.1 million people. Lovely place to live or visit. I'm— I actually run our document assembly department at Affinity Consulting and do a lot of the training. So this is kind of right in my wheelhouse. And I also relentlessly cook new recipes and post my favorites on Pinterest. If you look up Baron Henley on Pinterest, you'll find me. Be glad to share. And I I'd love to know what your favorite recipes are. Okay. Enough about me. Let's talk about the subject at hand. Kind of set the stage here. What is the most popular method by which documents are drafted in Legal? Well, it's pretty, it's a landslide winner. And this is it. And that is to find an existing document that's pretty close to the next one you need and save it as a new file name and make changes to it. We, you know, that's got a lot of names. Find, rename, and modify is self-evident as to what that is. But there's a lot of problems with this. And even though it's the most popular way to do it, I just want to point out some of the drawbacks. First of all, it relies on somebody's memory. It could be your memory. A lot of times, the lawyer is gathering information and asking someone else to draft the document, or at least the first draft. And they often have no idea where that starting point document is. But regardless, a lot of times we can't find the starting point document, you know, the one that would be perfect if you could just remember the client's name, you could just remember what you called it. And a lot of times we just can't. So, and then of course, the older you get, the more difficulty, promise me, I promise you, it'll, it'll happen. You'll have with memory and trying to remember what the client's name and where you put something and exactly what the facts were and how to find that document again. Sometimes you never can. It's really easy to leave something out that wasn't in your starting point document. You know, there was nothing in there to remind you to add it. And, you know, it could have been an easy copy and paste and you just forgot. It's even easier to leave something in you should have taken out. And anybody I think that reviews documents on a regular basis encounters routinely, you know, this weird provision in a document that, you know, somebody else sent to you, for example. And you're reviewing it and you're like, this has nothing to do with what we're talking about in this case. And yet there it is. And that's almost always a leave-in. It's also very easy to miss something you should have changed. Like you did the he, she's, and the him, hers, but you forgot to do the search and replace for the his, her, and you left in a wrong pronoun. Or you left in some party's name and you didn't catch all the places that it should have changed. So your spell checker is happy. It's like, that's— you spelled it right, but it was completely the wrong word. And you read it 3 times and still missed it. And who finds it? Your client finds it, of course. And then the worst part of this is that depending on your practice area, the document you started with could have been compromised. It could have been negotiated with opposing counsel. You know, like if I'm going to do a settlement agreement and I've done hundreds of those in the past, I'm not going to start with a blank page. I'm going to find some other settlement agreement. Well, those are most often negotiated, of course. And so if I, if I find that document, it's pretty hard to put it back to neutral. Unless you're blessed with a photographic memory, I'm not, then it might be really difficult to remember all the little compromises you made in order to arrive at a document everybody would be willing to sign. So the point is, if you are using old documents as the foundation of new ones, and that's how you normally do it, then I think you are introducing a margin for error, which should be unacceptable. Another problem with that that I don't even have a slide on, but I just want to point out, if you keep taking old documents and recycling them into new documents, those documents accumulate digital baggage and formatting problems that are going to be harder and harder to deal with as time goes on. And a lot of people don't ever go back to a consistent starting point. They take whatever the last one was they did and they save it as a new file name. And you may not even know where these things came from. I mean, I talk to lawyers all the time that have been using the same documents for decades. So those can be problematic. And I'm sure you've seen what it's like when you take an old document that has formatting problems and you try to use it for a new one and every time you touch it, it just gets worse. So there's that problem in addition to just all the things I mentioned earlier. The first giant leap forward you could take is to create what we call gold standard templates. Yeah, that's just like a term we kind of made up. But anyway, it means I built a thing that is a good starting point. And whenever I'm going to do a new document of this type, I go back to that starting point. And I'll give you a couple of examples from clients. So here's a good example of— this is an antenuptial agreement, obviously. And what they did was they went in and identified all of the fill points up front because the way that they worked was just a simple search and replace. So if I take, you know, man full name, and let's say I do a find man full name, paste, let me take off the formatting, and I replace that with John A. Doe, replace all, okay, replace 7 of those. And then I go man, or first name, and I replace that with John, replace all, there was 59 of those. And then I go first name possessive. And you know, that'll be John, you know, John apostrophe S, and I keep replacing it. And by the time I get done, you know, replacing all these things, the document will be complete. And then they used a nice little trick where you could select all the red stuff at once and delete it with one click. They also identified optional text in here. So you can see down here I've got the, you know, this is an optional provision. Now this is kind of obvious as to when this would come in or out. Based on its language, but they could have and should have probably said, here's where it begins and here's where it ends and this is the test by which you would include it. You know, like on this one, I'm not really sure. When would I choose this and when would I choose this? Obviously, I got to pick one of them. So you could just add that. Like instead of saying pick one, say use this option if and then use this option if and then the option stops here. And that would have made this a little bit better. But it's still good, right? It's still, you know, I've got obviously this or this. I got 2 legal representation paragraphs. And they didn't really say when you would use one, but that would be easy to add. And that would make this a lot better. So to use this, you basically delete the stuff you don't need. You do the search and replace on all these things and your document's done. And another really important thing about this is now I've got something I can come back and improve over time. If you're constantly recycling documents forward, then there's nothing to go back and make better. Because you're not going back to the same thing every time. So, you know, we've all drafted some really cool little provision to deal with this fact pattern issue or wrinkle that we're likely to encounter again. But we kind of lose it to the ether because we didn't have a place to put it. And you might remember that you drafted something like that previously, but good luck finding it. So this is a thing that you can always come back to and improve. So that's really important to this. And notice, I mean, we're not talking about any automation or anything yet. I'm just using Word, right? I'm just making some forms. This is another good example. What I like about this one was they said, you know, if there are children, then this is what you get. If there are no children, this is what you get. And this is when the no children or the children options stop. If there's a voluntary appearance, I get semicolon down to here. And all they did is use the highlighter, you know, this little button right here in Word, to identify they were connecting logic here. This is a really smart idea. I know that, you know, if defendant is served, I'm going to go down to the next green thing, and that's when it ends. So this semicolon and is going to come in no matter what because it's not wrapped in any logic. Again, I could do a global search and replace pretty easy and get through. They didn't really compile, obviously, a list of all the things I'd need to search and replace, but it's self-evident what it's asking for. And one of the other things I want to make sure that you do if you're going to build documents like this. Notice that they tagged, like I don't want to just say, oh, it's husband or wife. Which party husband or wife? So they have a plaintiff and they have a defendant. So think about that also when you're setting up fields, when you're just trying to identify fill points in a template. What party is that related to? Because you want to be able to do a search and replace. And if all I have is a bunch of husband or wives in here, then I'm going to have to read each one to figure out which party it's related to. Okay, so that is wildly better than finding some old document, saving it as a new file name, and making changes to it. Now, once you get that, there's a whole bunch of other cool stuff you can do, like all kinds of cool stuff. And this is what we're actually— I'm going to show you how to do in this class. And in this case, I'll just, I'll do a quick example for you. And this is a— notice I landed on a field here. And so this is an Illinois power of attorney form. So it's already been automated using what Word is capable of. So I'll do my own power of attorney. So in this instance, it's Illinois. I'll say Chicago. Now there's a bunch of pronouns in here. And this would all automatically calculate all of them. My wife, Jodi Henley. Say she's also in Chicago. I am going to appoint successor agent my daughter, Ariel Henley, who's in Phoenix, AZ. And then these are optional provisions. And so I'm including or excluding these provisions just based on how I answer that. We'll call this the Henley Family Trust. And then once I, I'm hitting the Tab key to advance to each subsequent field. So I can include that or I could include that. And then once I get to the last one, when I hit Tab key one more time, then the magic is gonna happen and that document's done. So notice that my table of data entry disappeared. Everything is filled in. Baron Henley of Chicago, Illinois. Jodi of Chicago, Illinois. These are the provisions that I included. There's the reference to the Henley Family Trust. There was actually one above this, which was the power to, fund the trust, which didn't come in here because I said I don't want it, right? So it's not only is it gone, there's no evidence of it having been here, and the subsequent paragraphs are lettered correctly. So, you know, that if I hadn't been talking while I did that, that would have taken just a few seconds to knock out a document. And I can always come back and make further changes, of course, if I need to. But that's what I just showed you is what we're going to do today. In fact, we're going to use this form. So it's a good example form on how to work through these features that Word has always possessed, but which almost no one uses. So anyway, let me close that. Don't save it. Of course, the foundation of what I just did was a gold standard template. So once you get gold standard templates, other options open up. Here's another one. Now, document assembly software is a tool. It's a software application, and they do not come with documents or forms. It is a tool that allows you to automate what you already have. Okay, now there— so I'm not talking about like a subscription system like Wealth Counsel, where when I sign up, they provide an automation tool and all the documents and all the language. So, you know, and if that's there are systems out there for that. If you're in certain practice areas, you're gonna have options for commercial automation systems, and you should investigate those. If you're not, or you really like your own language and you don't wanna use somebody else's language, then you might wanna consider automating your own language. So what this does, what all document assembly tools do, is they allow you to set up all the questions you've been asking and answering in your head for all these years. When you generate a document. You're gonna codify that. So the computer's gonna ask you the questions and then how you answer the questions is gonna give you exactly the document that you want. The good options here, and I'll show them to you in a minute, actually allow you to create not just an interview, but a dynamic interview that can change automatically based on how you answer questions. So in other words, I can control all the questions that appear, how they're phrased, whether or not they appear at all, the order that they appear, right? The whole interview you have control over. So you can walk somebody through a complicated process and make it really hard for them to mess it up, even if they're not super familiar with these kind of documents. In addition to the fact that you can add help text to any screen that you came across. So the screenshot that you see right now is a program called Contract Express, which is owned by Thomson Reuters West. So basically, the way they all work, they work with Word. You use your documents, right? You answer questions and it does— and the software does the heavy lifting. Here are the big players. Now, the top 3 here are the ones that are arguably the most powerful. They actually— the form tool is good and it's not expensive. But the problem is it does not allow you to create a dynamic interview. It's static. And so you have every question will appear every single time, no matter what. And the user has to know when to ignore or complete the answer to a question. And in a perfect world, I wouldn't have to do that. So these all allow you to do that. These are also web-based. Hot Docs and Express Docs are either web-based or desktop. In other words, the whole thing will work on your laptop or your desktop. You don't have to have a web connection in order to use it. But they also offer that as an option as well. They all work in Word for Windows. They do not work in Word for Mac. Now, the automation tools I'm going to show you built into Word later, they actually do work in Word for Mac. However, you know, if I had Hot Docs, I can create a template and someone using a Mac could use the template because it's happening in a browser. And so at the end of answering all the questions, you get a link. It says click here to download your completed document. You download it. It doesn't matter if you're using an iPad or a Mac or a Windows or an Android or whatever it is. As long as you got an internet connection and a browser, you can create Word documents and specifically completely customized Word documents for your client or your fact pattern. So let's stop thinking about document assembly, which obviously I, I'm passionate about that because I run that department. I've been doing it for 23 years and I, you know, I love it. But we got to back up a minute and instead just talk about the underlying templates, which are of course the foundation of anything I do with automation. The first issue is 80% of your accumulated intellectual capital is stored in forms that's hard to find, specifically old documents and email. And if you can't find that stuff, then you're simply sacrificing it. Your ability to instead marshal content into a reusable form, that is a big component of the buzz phrase knowledge management. And I'm not being judgy, but law firms stereotypically are horrible at this. Everything, you know, even the standard— this is sad, but my experience is, let's say I go into a law firm and I have 5 lawyers in an estate planning department. They're in the same practice area within the same firm. It would be unusual if they all actually used the same set of documents. It would be unusual if they had any kind of formal template set up that they were sharing and improving over time. Instead, the typical scenario is each one is using their own stuff. They don't even like the other people's documents. They wouldn't even consider using them. They don't even format them the same. And again, they're in the same firm practicing the same area of law.. So, that's one of the underlying problems with this. Lawyers love to agree to disagree. And a lot of times, you know, like if a law firm hires a new estate planning lawyer, and that estate planning lawyer has experience and worked at some other firm, guess what they bring with them? Their documents from the other firm. And so, they're like, well, I really like these, and I want to keep using these. And then, you know, pretty soon everyone has done that. And everybody's doing their own thing. That is not terribly constructive and you're not really working as a team and not capitalizing on what a firm could and should be doing for you. You know, the word processor stuff, that doesn't cost you a penny. You already have Word, so you can rock and roll with that. And ultimately, you know, we get calls every day from law firms saying, I want to buy, you know, insert whatever the technology is. I want to buy case management software. I want to buy, you know, I'm sick of Word. I want to— is there anything else out there? You know, the best bang for your technology dollar is to learn how to use what you already own instead of keep buying new stuff. Now sometimes you don't have a choice, right? Like I've got a pro— let's say I use this old program and it's no longer supported. Okay, then you need to buy something, you need to get something new. But a lot of times, in most cases, people are barely using what they already have. It's really common. For example, let's take case management software or matter management software as an example. They'll be like, yeah, you know, I have Clio, but I know I'm only using like 10% of it. That's normal. That shouldn't be acceptable, but it is, however, normal. So your word processor is the same kind of technology. I can almost assure you that your entire office, including the people who are most experienced with Word, are barely scratching the surface of what Word could be doing for them. And I have 23 years of experience on which I'm basing that opinion. So I'm willing to stand behind it. And if you think that your firm is doing, you know, using Word to its highest potential, shoot me one of your complex documents and I'd be glad to give you a free assessment of functionality not being used. I just put that out there. You'll see my email address again at the end in case you want to do that. If I do this, then I'm really eliminating or really significantly alleviating those margins for error we previously talked about. If I have a template I'm coming back to, I'm not likely to miss a change. I'm not likely to leave something in or out. And it's not a compromised document. So you didn't spend any money and you significantly wiped out those problems we talked about earlier. If you think about, if you're in a document-intensive area of practice, and by that I mean, you know, the deliverable is a set of documents, or the bottleneck in your life is typically, I need to get these documents done. When people are yelling at you, hey, when, Baron, when are you gonna give me that thing? The thing they're usually talking about is a document. So if I can catch up and stay up, actually it reduces my stress. It makes me a happier person because people aren't yelling at me so much. I know that seems like maybe an overstatement, but a lot of, it's not. And you know, a lot of people are constantly bottlenecked and bogged down with drafting assignments. If you think back to what's changed, you know, remember when, you know, when I passed the bar in 1993 and the technology was really in its infancy and at that point in law firms, we, you know, most people didn't use email. Most lawyers didn't have computers. That was strictly a support staff thing. We were still mostly in DOS at that point. Windows 3.1 had just come out. So, you know, it was a completely different world. Today, you know, and when it started to trickle out, when the technology came out, we were told, I remember hearing these exact words, "Baron, don't worry about the technology. Let the support staff people do the technology. You need to focus on doing what only a lawyer can do." And in 1993, I could do what only a lawyer could do and not touch technology. And that is obviously no longer the case. So what happened was this technology was supposed to make our lives better. It didn't. For most people, it had the opposite effect. It sped everything up 100 miles an hour. Now there's competition from the internet. There's competition from all over the place. There's more lawyers than there are consumers of legal services. Lawyers handle a higher volume of cases just to maintain profitability they previously enjoyed. And because they have to and because they can, the technology enabled that. There's way less hourly billing when it comes to any kind of transactional area of law. We used to make more money, remember, when it took us longer to do something. And that's not true at all anymore. Plus, you know, the internet allows clients to look around, shop around, try to solve their own problems. I'm sure a lot of lawyers have stories about how a client came into their office and figured they'd already solved the issue and just wanted them to draft something, like they were practicing law via the internet. So anyway, today, because we have higher competition, slow is a penalty. And if you think about, like, if I could do all this stuff faster,, then I would be happier, my clients would be happier, I would have lower costs. And ultimately, a lot of times the template is, a set of templates is the shareable thing. I've talked to lots of lawyers over the years who wanna downshift their practice. You know, they're getting up around the retirement age and like a solo small firm, and they're just gonna shut it down. They're like, look, I don't know what I can give somebody. I don't know what I could sell. The list of clients for whom you previously did work isn't a very marketable thing. But the how you did it, what did you learn over all these years of practicing law, that's really valuable. The question is, has it been captured anywhere? And for most people, it hasn't. I might have 500,000 Word or WordPerfect files on a server someplace, but it's just a pile of files. I can't really convey anything useful to somebody through that pile of files. If you have templates with narrative, then you can. There's a generation of lawyers, and I'm included in that generation, where we didn't grow up with the technology, and we were told to ignore it, and then by the time we realized, holy crap, I really need to understand this, your life was going 100 miles an hour, and it was really hard to catch up. And then you had this whole new younger generation who had been using that stuff their whole lives, and they were very fluent with it and weren't intimidated by it. And, you know, ultimately technology makes smart people feel stupid on a daily basis. Like it's my job and I get a new whatever it is, a new phone, I get a new version of a software program that I previously mastered and they, what do they do? They change everything and I have to relearn it all and I feel like a moron, I have to start over again. Nobody likes to feel like that. So there's sort of a subconscious pushback against it You're like, here we go again. Oh my God, they got this new version. They changed everything around. So that's just, there's nothing we can do about that. But what technology can allow you to do is to do the work that previously you delegated to somebody else. Like the COVID thing has really made this a big issue, right? We had, you know, there was a lot of lawyers who were very used to having support staff within arm's reach and that they would work together, collaborate, and to get work done in the same space. And then COVID caused them to be physically separated from each other. And we get calls all the time from people saying, God, can I just, I just need to learn how to do this myself. I can't, you know, it was different when we were all in the office all the day, all the time, but now we're not. And, you know, even if they are, there's an expectation that this may occur again. I mean, obviously we're having, like right now as I record this, we're having a spike. And so some people are getting lockdown orders that previously didn't have them. So we don't know what's happening. But the point is, if I have a template, even if I don't know anything about the word processor, if I start with a document that is set up correctly, it's hard to break it. Most people can't imagine that, but trust me, it's true. If the document is set up correctly in the first place, You can control the formatting no matter what you do, no matter what you copy and paste into the document. The problem for most people is they've never actually started with a document that wasn't completely messed up. And the more you learn about Word, if you decide to pursue that, the more you realize that almost nobody knows anything about Word. Because using the program teaches you nothing. The stuff you need to know to control complex formatting in a legal document is overtly concealed. And you can click around all you want and you're not going to find it. So unless you want to read a 500-page manual or take classes in that, it's otherwise not discoverable. And in my experience, most people don't want to do those things. Anyway, hiring new people. How do you, how do you ramp them up quickly? Particularly if, again, your job is to draft complex documents. Well, if you had templates, you could really solve that problem. Otherwise, how do you convey what you know about how to draft certain complex documents to somebody else? Not very easy. And again, if the— all of the power of the word processor can be built in. I always use a driving analogy for this. Like I've been— I'm 54 years old. I have been driving since I was 16. And knock on wood, I have never had a wreck. Never. Now I know there's some luck involved in that, but there's also, I would argue, quite a bit of skill. I pay attention. I use my mirrors, I use my turn signals. I don't let myself be distracted. I don't drive like a maniac. I don't drive when I'm drunk, etc. And what do you know, I went all this time and I'm a good driver. Okay, technology is exactly the same. If you start with something good, and my point on the driving is I don't know anything about cars. I can't even change my own oil. But that doesn't prevent me from being a good driver. If the technology you start with is set up correctly, then you can also be a good driver even if you don't know how it was set up in the first place, right? So the point here is you just got to get there. And if you get there, then you've got something you can use and you might be more or even completely self-reliant with respect to producing work product and complex documents and not have to rely on anybody else to take documents the final mile and make them, quote, look pretty. For the client or the court. So here's some guidelines for creating templates. First of all, you got to be able to find these things. Like, you have all this, these great things you've drafted previously, and it's, they're really hard to locate. You should consider getting a search utility that will make that easier. Now, if you already have what's called a document management system, and that, so NetDocuments, WorldDocs, iManage Work. You know, there's, there's many of them. Then they have full text search capability and all different kinds of ways you can find your stuff. But if all you got is, you know, 1.5 million Word and PDF files on a server someplace, well, you've got your work cut out for you. The built-in search utilities in a Windows or Mac computer aren't terribly useful. And you might want to upgrade to something that is more powerful and can help you find these things that you want to use in your templates. If you're a Windows user, Copernic Desktop Search, super good. X1 Search, super good. All these are good. But these are— those are the two I'd recommend. They have free trials as well. And if you're a Mac user, I think you will find WhoToSpot to be a better alternative to Spotlight, which of course is included. Then this is one of the rules that's not intuitive, and I almost always see it violated with firms that have actually bothered to put together some kind of template set. You want one template per type of instrument. And the reason for that is, and in my entire career I've never seen this not be true, if somebody has, let's say they're an estate planning lawyer and they have a, they've got a pour-over will and a simple will, and a married with kids will, and a no kids unmarried will, and they've got one with a testamentary trust, and they've got one with specific bequests in it, and they got all these options, right? And they might have 5 will templates. And whenever I receive a set of templates like that, they'll tell me, yeah, they're the same except for these fact pattern variations. So I run redlines, I go into Word, and I start doing comparisons between them. And not a single time in 23 years have there been the only differences present between the documents were intended. That's never happened. Because it was never anybody's job to make sure they were consistent over time. So when some law changed or some new provision needed to be added, it never got added or modified in all the documents. So you end up with all these unintended differences between your variations on a theme. And I, I believe so strongly that cannot be overcome that I don't even try. The only, the only way to deal with that is to combine everything into one template. And if you do that, then you actually can, because the, the common language is only going to be in there one time. So there's no way it could be different because it's only present single in a single split place in the entire template. So what you want is every provision in the order it could occur changeable text consistently identified so you can do a global search and replace. Don't forget, tag it with the party name. Plaintiff he/she, plaintiff him/her, plaintiff husband/wife, whatever it is. Um, optional text identified where it starts and where it ends. And here's the other thing about a good template: assume nothing. Don't assume you know all about this stuff. You've been doing these kind of documents since forever. You want to make a template that somebody who hasn't done them forever can use and not make mistakes with. So you can't just assume they know when something ends, even though it's intuitively obvious to you. So you want to tag starts and ends. And if there's some test to bring it in, then what is the test? Just type it right in the template. Okay? And you saw that in those examples that I gave you earlier. Word, of course, has the ability to compare documents. You go to the review ribbon and you go compare, compare. And always remember to click the more button. And you can compare one against the other and it will show you the differences between them. Do not try to eyeball this. But that's going to be a key thing in helping you pull together a good template. Here's how this works. Let's say I have 5 will examples. And each one is a variation on a fact pattern. Pick one of them. Ideally, probably the one that you use most often. And then make a copy of it and call it master, like master will. And then once you do that, then you're going to pick that first one and you're going to run a redline between it and whatever you decide is version 2. Okay, and that's going to produce a redline. And then you're going to say, okay, here are the differences between these. And you're going to manually add those to the master. Like if this is true, then this piece comes in, otherwise this other thing comes in. Then you're going to go back and compare that baseline against the third version, and then the baseline against the fourth version, and the baseline against the fifth version until you run out. That way you have to have this one thing against which you compare everything else. Then by the time you're done, you will have a master form. So, you know, and it might look something like this. So this was, I took 5 sample wills and I kept running red lines and red lines and I ended up with something like this. So if it's a pour-over will, then I get this, this is my first article. If it's a simple will, this is my first article. And, you know, and a lot of times, like when I was doing this for the client, I'm like, why? First of all, If this is describing the family situation, why is one called family information, the other called declarations? Like, why don't you just call it the same thing? And then secondly, it seems like, you know, this is pretty much the same to here if it's a simple or a pour-over. And then I get all this stuff down here that was showing up in all of the simple wills. Why wouldn't you want this stuff in a pour-over? And they were like, oh yeah, you You know, that should be in the pour-over as well. So you discover things when you're running these redlines that maybe you didn't know were in there, differences that shouldn't have been there. And this is your chance to go through and audit that language and make sure that it's all consistent, right? So, and in this case, all I did was put in these blue brackets, you know, around things that changed. And then I did, you know, if married, so, and the blue bracket shows the end of it. Anyway, this is your starting point. And if you do nothing else than this, this is still a massive upgrade from finding old documents and saving them as a new file name and making changes. Two ways to show the differences. And I don't know where he came up with these terms. I call it chunk it out. By that I mean, what does the whole paragraph look like if this is the fact pattern? What does the whole paragraph look like if this is the fact pattern? Right? So if, if, if, stop. Or you could blend it. So these are showing you the same paragraphs. In this case, I, the common language is present only once. Now, drawback of this approach is it takes longer to build. Two significant benefits of this approach are this is a much better starting point if you intend to automate. And it takes up a lot less vertical space. Like if I make a template like this and I'm showing you whole paragraphs, how they're going to look under different fact patterns, I'm going to have a really long template. In this case, it can be a lot more manageable in terms of length because I'm combining things. You might also take this opportunity to get rid of the legalese or any other nonsensical gibberish that's in there that your clients are not likely to be able to understand. There's definitely a trend toward creating documents that non-lawyers can, can read and grasp. You might also want to check out this product called WordRake. And you feed Word documents to it. It runs an algorithm on your document and uses Word's track changes feature to suggest ways to improve the language, eliminating legalese, getting rid of redundant terms. So in other words, it doesn't actually just make the changes. It shows you what it would suggest that you do. And you can accept or reject each one of those proposed changes. Super good product. I believe they have a 7-day free trial. So you can run a couple of documents through it and see what you think. But it's not expensive and it's a subscription annual deal. You might also think about making it easier to navigate your documents. You know, like add titles and headings.. And maybe a table of contents. If you've got a long document, like for example, in a revocable trust, I would argue that a table of contents would be quite handy because they tend to be long, complicated documents. And a lot of times people don't put them in because they're too annoying to keep accurate in terms of their page references. Well, let me just point out that, again, if the Word document is set up correctly, generating a table of contents is 4 clicks and it's always right and it can immediately be updated to reflect any subsequent edits to the document. So if you have to type that, you have to type a table of contents, it's awful. But if the document's set up right, it's 4 clicks. So it goes from awful to easy. And the only difference is what did you start with and how was it constructed? Maybe, you know, a lot of times documents kind of came together over time and you don't even know how they got like this. But the question you have to ask yourself is, does it make sense? Is it logical? Maybe this is the chance to kind of reorganize things and kind of rebuild the structure of the document so it flows better. So this is, you know, I look at this as an opportunity to kind of fix a lot of other stuff, not just pull all my language into a single instrument. Then another thing you might want to consider is putting together a drafting guide of some kind so that you have something that, you know, you could print out and interview a client with and then hand off. Let's say you have no interest in drafting the stuff yourself, but you're the one who talks to the client. Well, if you have something— and again, what are these things? These are Word documents that you can update and mess with over time as necessary. But it's a due diligence checklist. You can't forget to ask a question when it was in your face on the questionnaire that you are using to interview the client. And it's very common— you may or may not be aware of this, but it's very common— if the protocol in your office is that the lawyer gathers information and hands it off to somebody else who does the actual drafting. That handoff is often fumbled. And I talk to the people who are the recipients of that all the time. And they say stuff like, they never give me all the information I need. So I just have to bird dog the stuff they didn't send me. Or they give it to me in an inconvenient order. So I draft this whole thing and then the last thing they say makes me have to go back and change a bunch of stuff. That I already drafted. They should have told me that right up front, and I would have done all this stuff different, but then they told me at the end. This ideally will track the order that the person drafting the document needs it in, and it will allow them to be more efficient in their drafting. The other thing is, you know, you want to create template files. People say they use templates all the time. They actually aren't using templates. A template file is a different kind of file. So if, you know, like this is a document. So if I save this to my desktop, I just want to show you one super big difference between templates and documents. So I'll put this on my desktop and hit save. Now I'm going to make a template out of it. Okay. These are the steps. Open up any document, doesn't matter. File, save as. Sorry, file, save as. And then once you get to the browse screen here, What you want to do is down here, save as type. Let me, let me zoom in on this so you can see this a little better. Save as type, switch to Word template, or possibly, and we're going to be using these later, Word macro enabled template. But one of these two forms. Let's say I want to just do a plain Word template. As soon as you choose this, Word will rudely redirect you to some weird folder where it wants you to store templates. You are not required to store folders or templates in its weird folder. So you can put them wherever you want. So I'm gonna go back to the desktop. And notice, notice the suffix is different. It's not.docx, it's.dotx. Okay, so I'm going to zoom back out and hit save. And we're going to close that. Then we're going to go to my desktop. And here are my two files. There's the operating agreement. And there's the operating agreement. Let me change my resolution so you can see this a little bit better. Identify, monitor 2. Let's lower my resolution. This will make everything larger, should be easier to see. Back to my desktop. And where did my files go? Here they are. So here are my files. Um, I wanted to make sure I was still sharing the right screen. My screen's shifted on me. Anyway, you notice that the template file has a.dotx and this is the.docx. What's different is, one of the things that's different is what happens when I double-click. So if I double-click, okay, look what it opened. See, I hope you can see the top of my screen. This is the actual file. So if I make a change to this and I hit save, you just overwrote your original. Okay, so that's, that's the problem. Now, if I— I'm going to close that and go back to my desktop. If I double-click a template, you have a different result. Watch. Look at the top of my screen. This is not, this is not the file name that I double-clicked. This says document 4. So if you, if you create a template, it makes it much harder for you to accidentally overwrite it because if you double-click it, you don't get the template. You get a new unnamed document based upon the template which contains all of its text and formatting. So if I hit save, it's going to say, what do you want to call it? Where do you want to put it? It's not going to accidentally overwrite the original. So that's a very important aspect to templates. And if I was really paranoid that someone was still going to You know, if I wanted to actually open that template and make changes to the underlying template, I could go right-click and choose open. If I did that, it would actually open the template. Let's say I'm afraid somebody might do that. Okay, you could always right-click the file and go down to the properties of the file. And you could tell it, make this read-only. It's just a checkbox. And then they wouldn't, even if they actually open the template, let's say by accident, they try to hit save without hitting save as. It'll say, no, no, no, no, this is read-only. You're going to have to call it something else or put it somewhere else. So you can pretty easily protect yourself there. Now, anybody could Google how to turn off read-only in a Word file, and they would find that answer pretty fast. But if people are doing that to you, then you have a people problem and not a technology problem, right? That's a whole other issue not related to this discussion. OK, hang on a second. So I want to make that my— I better leave that alone. It changed monitors on me there, but okay. So the next thing you want to do is make sure that your templates are usable. So let me give you an example of this. Let's say I wanted to add— let me turn off my fields, Alt+F9, there we go. Let's say I wanted to add a new paragraph to this. And I went to the, you know, the end of a paragraph, like 6, and I hit enter. And I get a 7. I was like, oh my gosh, I got a 7. That's fantastic. I can't believe it. Well, I need to move it down one. So I hit enter to try to create the space and the number disappears. So then I go, oh, well, let me go back up here and hit another enter. And then I can go down here and type my paragraph. Oh, but wait, it's bold and underlined. Why is it bold and underlined? Well, first of all, let's get rid of this 7. And let me come down here. And what I want to do is I need to tab over to type this. So I go here and I hit tab and the number changes. And I hit it again and I get— I'm like, what is going on here? So I end up like giving up and typing 7. And I got to turn off underline. And then I hit a tab and I— but now I have two 7s. And now you get to go through and renumber all these paragraphs manually. Right? So none of that should have happened. If that's the kind of thing you experience, then your documents are just set up wrong. If this was set up correctly, when I went to the end of 6 and hit a hard return, I would have seen a 7, and the 7 would become an 8, and the 8 would become a 9. The spacing would have been correct and everything would have worked correctly. So if you're experiencing those kind of formatting glitches, then your documents aren't set up right. But the point is, you could have great content, but if you have this kind of crap going on, no one's going to use it. Including you. So, and our automation stuff we're going to do later, it's, it's, it's going to get worse. If you intend to use document assembly, then you might want to think about the questions that, you know, you've been asking yourself and answering yourself, probably in your head all these, all these years. And, you know, what am I going to do about writing those things down? Because ultimately, they're going to need to show up on the screen. So you might want to consider, um, trying to, um, start codifying all that. It doesn't have to be fancy. Just open up a Word document and try to think about all the branches of your own decision tree. And if there's, uh, like a branch or a fork in that decision tree, um, what should people be thinking about, right? And then finally, look at the whole process. Like, you could take we've, we discovered this the hard way. You can go in and fix a messed up drafting process. Like I can take what was taking 8 hours to draft documents and squish that down into 30 minutes. And it may not actually make any improvement overall because the whole rest of the process was screwed up. That's, so don't look at this in a vacuum. Drafting is often just one, one piece of a larger system. And though you got to look at the whole system, not just the little drafting piece. So keep that in mind as you're trying to put something together. You gotta go see what else is going on, because even if you squish the drafting process and down into a tiny little thing, and we've seen it, we've seen that happen before, where we took a drafting process and, you know, exponentially reduced it in terms of time, while simultaneously creating increasing accuracy, and it still took just as long from start to finish to get the whole thing done because there are other things wrong. So, and you know, this is a whole separate seminar, but you know, that's process mapping. And there's lots of ways you can map your processes. It could be as simple as a word processor document where you just go through and write down all the steps and all the sub-steps. That's fine. If you want to draw it out, you could check out something like I'll show, I'll give you a couple of examples here. Lucidchart.com or smartdraw.com. Both of these are flowchart systems that you can make some pretty, whoops, some pretty fancy flowcharts with. And I don't think you'll have to read a manual to do that. But, you know, if you want to draw, you know, your boxes and connector lines, and here's what, you happens if you go down this branch of the decision tree, et cetera, you can certainly do that. I would argue that you're just fine doing it in Word, but you do need to look at everything. Okay. Let's close that. Now, let me go back to this. My email address again on the screen. I think I'll make sure it's in the materials that you guys get for this. But if you have questions about, let's go back to just compiling a template. If you have questions about that, then send me an email. If you've got documents you're on the struggle bus with in terms of their formatting or you can't get it to do what you want it to do, I can solve any problem you ever experienced in any Word document in your entire career. And I can probably do it in less than 3 minutes. So that's a challenge I'm throwing out to you. So if, you know, you can't, your foundational documents cannot be broken or you're not gonna be able to do anything constructive with the automation. So you gotta get that fixed first. So if you gotta, if that's an issue for you, let me know and there's lots of things we can do about that. Okay. Now, I am going to be using functionality in Word. Which has always been present, but which is by default concealed. And I wanted to show you how to open up the tools that you will need to do what we are about to undertake today. So first of all, let me turn off the tool so that I can more effectively show you how to turn it on. Okay, so here's the deal. In Word, the ribbon on which the tools exist that we want to use. In most versions of Word, it is not visible, that ribbon. And specifically, the ribbon that we're looking for is called the Developer ribbon. Okay. So all versions of Word have a Developer ribbon. It's just hidden from you. So we need to turn that on. And here's how you turn it on. You can right-click any button on a ribbon and you're going to say Customize the Ribbon. So right-click any button and choose Customize the Ribbon. And you're going to get this frightening-looking screen. But over on the right side, you will notice there's names. These are the tabs that you see across your screen. See? So these are the various ribbons that you can turn on or off in Word. And you will notice that there is one called Developer, which very likely does not have a check mark next to it. Check that in. Okay, so I check this in and I click OK. And now I have somewhere up here a Developer ribbon. This has all your automation tools in it. And there's a lot of stuff in here. Now, the only ones on all these little buttons that exist in both Word for Windows and Word for Mac are the ones that are under this. I'll zoom in on this real quick so you can see it. Okay. So it's a little briefcase, maybe with a wrench on it. And if I click on it, these legacy form tools, these are the fields that if you go to— in Mac, I don't remember the exact steps, but it's, I think it's just Insert and down to Field. You are inserting these fields, not these fields, these fields. Okay, and if you take a look at the PDF of the materials I'm providing as an accompaniment to this, I have giant screenshots of all this stuff to walk you through it. So the— and actually, the only two I'm going to use are— is this one says text form field, but that also includes dates and numbers and text, and then this one over here, which is a multiple choice. Occasionally, I need to use these because there might be a checkbox or something, but it's kind of uncommon for the kind of stuff that we'll be doing. So we're only gonna be using this and this, these two buttons. And if you want, if you know how to customize the quick access toolbar in Word, you can actually add that. I mean, the problem is I'm not always in the developer ribbon, but I want to use those tools. So as you can see, this quick access toolbar here exists in both Word for Windows and Word for Mac. It's normally at the very top of the screen. So it's normally up here and it has like 3 buttons on it. So what I did is I right-clicked any of the, any of the buttons on that toolbar, and I said show it below the ribbon. So it would get it off the top of my screen. And then if you want to customize this, then you can right-click any button on it and choose Customize the Quick Access Toolbar. And that's how I got this guy added. So if I come over here and right-click and say Customize the Quick Access Toolbar, and by the way, so this is a scary-looking screen, but it's quite logical. Let me explain what you're looking at. On the left side are buttons you could add, and on the right side are buttons already on your toolbar. Now I have a ton of buttons already here because I use this all the time. You might have only 3. It's fine. Over here on the left side, this is the most important thing. It's only showing you a tiny little subset of the buttons you could add. Those voted most popular by I don't know who, but I don't want any of them. So what you want to do is switch from popular commands to all commands. So I choose all commands and then wait for it, wait for it, wait for it. There you go. Now you have 10,000 buttons that you can add. The one that I added to make this easier is called Legacy Tools. So that is one button that you might want to add to your quick access toolbar. Then you won't have to click around so much. And there's another one called, what's it called? Insert a field. Okay. So another thing we're going to be doing a whole bunch today is we're going to be inserting fields into this document that we're going to automate. Now, in order to do that, I have to go Insert, Quick Parts, and Field. And that's frankly too many clicks because we're going to do that like 500 times. So you could add the button to the Quick Access Toolbar, in which case it it's one click away. I know that doesn't seem like a big deal. Trust me, it's a big deal. If you can make your life easier by adding buttons that you need to this QAT, then do it. So again, right-click any button on the QAT and say customize the quick access toolbar. Switch from popular to all. Give it a minute. And you'll have an option to add a button for anything imaginable to the quick access toolbar. Okay, and when you're done, just click OK. Okay, so this is my sample form and I have marked it up, obviously. And I put in, you know, I just used greater than, less than to identify changeable text. Put it in blue so it'd stand out a little bit. And that was my first thing. So this could be my will template or whatever it is. Doesn't matter. I just want to have one document And I've gone through and tried to figure out what's optional, right? So this is a provision that may not be included. Do you want to include the power to fund the trust? If you do, then you want to include this. And if you don't, I want it to disappear. So I said, here's where it starts, here's where it ends. And I did that as I walked through the document and was marking it up. That's what I was doing, right? So I find all the replaceable text. We've got You can see down here some pronouns I'm going to have to deal with. Um, county, more pronouns, client name, et cetera. So that's step 1. Once you've got all that built out, before I can do anything, I need to make a template out of this thing. Now we're going to do some fancy stuff and the fancy stuff is going to require that we bury a macro. Record and bury inside this template a macro. I don't know if you remember when I was going through that Illinois power of attorney earlier, and when I tabbed out of the last field, it automatically completed the document. All of the form fields became static text, and the entire table that I had just answered all the questions in automatically disappeared. Okay, a macro did that. And so we, we want that macro that makes the whole thing work, we want that buried in the template. So if I send this document or this template to anybody else, I don't have to install anything on their computer. Everything they need is in the template. All they gotta do is answer the questions. And once they tab out of the last field, boom, the document's gonna be finished. It'll look great. So we're gonna say this is a special kind of template. We're gonna go File, Save As. At the bottom of the screen when we get to the Save As Type, We are going to switch to a macro-enabled template right there. DOTM. Let me zoom in on that. Word macro-enabled template. DOTM. So I click on that. Remember, it's going to make you automatically go to some other, um, folder. You don't have to be in that folder. Switch back to whatever it was that you wanted to what folder you wanted to use. I'm just going to put this on my desktop. So I'll choose desktop and you can call it whatever you want. And by the way, if you want this actual form as something to play with, then shoot me an email. I'll send you a copy of this as a sample and then you could walk through the same exercises that you're watching right now. So I'm gonna hit save. Now that has no effect on the original document. It's still called whatever it was in whatever folder it was originally located in. I made a copy of it. And I made a copy of it as a macro-enabled template. In this case, the suffix is.dotm. And if you go, well, I can't tell if it's a.dotm or what. I can't see what the 4-letter suffix is. OK, then here's another little thing you can do. Go into Windows Explorer. OK, so hold down on your Windows logo key and hit E. And it's going to open this. And do me a favor and yourself a favor and click on the View ribbon and check off these two boxes. File, I want to see these things. And I would like to see hidden items. So check off these two boxes and then just close it. And thereafter you will actually be able to see the suffixes on the file names, which is very important. I don't know why Windows hides that. Okay. So before we get started on this, it's time for a break. So, um, I think you guys have lunch. So have a good lunch. And when we come back, we're going to automate this form and learn how to use all of those tools. Okay. We're back. Oh yeah. And I forgot to mention, um, the reason that I am not, I don't have my camera on is because I found that the little square of my talking head actually covers up part of the screen that I need you to see. Because I'll be clicking buttons that are over on the right side of the screen. And I want you to be able to see what I'm doing. So I just left my camera off. Hope that's not a problem. Anyway, here we are. We've created a DOTM. Template. And in order to get started with this process, what I want to do is create a table at the top where I'm going to enter all of the data. Remember, there was like a little list of questions and answers in a form of a table. So, and one of the things you want to do whenever you're building a template is click on the Home ribbon and first click on the Show/Hide button. And that'll turn on the Show/Hide button, this little paragraph mark. Will reveal non-printing characters, which we are going to need to see as we work through this. So the first thing I'm going to do is create a table at the top. And that table is going to be where we put in all the answers and the questions. So I'm going to go Insert ribbon, down to Table. It only needs to be 2 columns wide. So I'll just make— I can always add more, of course, but we'll start with this. And the reason that you see these weird little symbols is because I have Show/Hide turned on in case in case you're wondering. I turn that off, you can see they don't actually print. I'll leave that off for now just to kind of work through this. So the first thing, you know, I've already gone through the document, identified what the changeable fill points are. So the first thing is going to be we need something for client name. And we're going to need something for client city. And we're going to need client gender. Whoops. Tab, tab. And then we're going to need the first fill point that has to do with the agent, which is the relationship. So I'll say initial agent relationship to client. And, you know, e.g., my wife, something like that. Tab, tab. And then initial agent name, tab, tab, and initial agent city, and initial agent state. And then there's a, there's a yes/no question. Are you going to appoint a successor? And if, because if I do appoint a successor, I want to put in, obviously, the successor's name and contact information. And if not, it's just going to put in a bunch of blanks so that the if the person for whom I'm doing this power of attorney decides later to add a successor agent, they just write it in. So appoint successor agent, question mark. And then if they say yes, then I need a successor agent relationship to client. Just leave it at that. And then successor agent name. Successor agent city and state. And then there's some stuff. Remember, that's, if you recall back, there were some optional provisions. And one of them was, the first one was to the power to fund the trust. So I'm gonna say include power to fund trust. And the next one was include power to amend trust. And then if you include that one, then you— it wants to know the name of the trust. And then there was two more: include power to make gifts, include power to manage digital assets. And then finally, there's an acknowledgement all the way at the bottom. And the only thing you got to fill in there is the county the acknowledgement is happening in. So acknowledgement county. And those are all the fill points, right? And so one of the things we're gonna do is when you answer this, it's automatically gonna fill it in everywhere it needs to appear. And now we have to start setting up these fill points so that we can use them to populate the rest of the document. So the developer ribbon is now where we're headed. And as you recall, I'm clicking the little blue wrench box. And I'm going to go down and drop in an A/B field. Okay, so once you do that, it's going to drop in a field. Now, if I— the first thing I want to do when I drop in a field is I want to set up its properties. And you easily get into the properties of the field by simply double-clicking on top of it. And notice up here, I got text, number, date, current date, all kinds of stuff you can do there. And depending on what you choose, like if I say it's a date, then of course I get all kinds of date formats. If I keep it at text, then I have case format, right? So down here, this is a couple of important things here. The bookmark is how this field is going to be referenced in the document. And it's going to give you this generic text1, text2 crap that's completely useless. So you want to make sure that you give that a name that means something. And the only little caveat here is you cannot have a space in the name of a bookmark. Okay, so you got to run it all together, use underscores. I'm just going to call it Client Name. Here's the next little weird thing. So that I can use the response they provide here elsewhere in the document, I must click Calculate on Exit. We will do that for every single field we add in this table. Okay, so the two weird things are you got to give it a name that means something, don't leave it what it was, and don't forget to click Calculate on Exit. All right, and then I click OK. And I'm ready to move on to the next one. So I go back to this button, down to AB, double-click it. I got to come down here and say client city, calculate on exit. Okay, go down to gender. Now this one is not going to be a text, it's going to be a multiple choice. I want to present the user with a dropdown that says male or female. So in that case, I'm going to click the toolbox and I'm using this button. Let me zoom in on that. So that's my multiple choice field. So I click on that. Looks the same as the other ones, but not when you double-click it. When I double-click it, now I'll say dropdown item, male, add, female, add. And obviously, I could add as many options as I needed there. Down here, I'm going to switch this to client gender and calculate on exit. Okay, so I just type in your options, click add. If you screw it up, just hit remove. If they're not in the order you want, you can click on them and you can toggle this and change their order. All right, remember you can't have a space in the name. Gotta use calculate on exit. Okay, now I'm ready for the next one. This is going to be initial agent relationship to client. So that's going to be a Toolbox AB field. Double-click and we'll call it, um, now I'm just going to shorten these up so they're not super long. I'm going to use IA to stand for initial agent, and I'll just say relationship. Don't forget to click calculate on exit. Click OK. Then I click here, go back up, AB, double-click. Down here is what I got to worry about. IA name, calculate on exit. And if you make a mistake, you can always go back and like you might have forgotten to change this to something meaningful, just go back and change it. It's no big deal. Then I go here, click on this down to AB. And this is going to be IA City. Calculate on exit. Now I'm going to have IA State. Okay. You might notice that it says down here, add help text. And I'm not going to discourage you from doing that. But no one will notice it. It literally shows up like down here at the bottom of the screen, and people don't even think to look down there for help. So that looks like it would be a great thing. And it actually really isn't that useful. So just so you know. Now the next one is appoint successor agent. And this is going to be a multiple choice again, right? I want a yes/no. So they don't have a separate true/false question you can set up. You just have to do a multiple choice and give, make the options yes or no. So I click on the, on the little wrench and down to multiple choice. Double-click it. We're going to call this appoint successor. And we're going to say calculate on exit. Up here we're going to make our options yes and no. Okay, so I'm just typing the thing, I click Add, it puts them in. I click OK. And now we got to set up the same stuff we had here. You might, to speed things up, could I copy these and paste them down there and just modify them? Sure, absolutely. So if I hit copy and paste, I could speed this up a little bit. I don't want to get too ahead of myself, but you, you can actually modify an existing field. So I go back down to AB. This is going to be, um, successor agent. So I'm going to call it SA relationship, calculate on exit. Come down here, same deal, AB, SA name. Go down here. S-A, city. Calculate. Okay. Now you could, you could make this a multiple choice if you wanted for this, for the state. And it would just be annoying to type in, you know, 50 states plus D.C. So I'm not doing that, but you could if you wanted to be really thorough about it. So I'm going to double-click this and this is going to be SA State and calculate on exit. Okay, now I have some multiple choices. So this is going to be multiple choice. We're going to call it— so this is going to be— all these are going to be yes. No options. We're going to call it Power Fund Trust, calculate on exit. Then we go here and we do another multiple choice and we call it Power Amend Trust, calculate on exit, and my options are yes and no. Okay. This is just an AB box because I got to put in the name of the trust. So I click back on the wrench, down to AB, double-click. This will just be trust name. Calculate on exit. Now I'm back to multiple choices. So click on that. Yes. Hang on. No, it's going to be Power Make GIFs. Um, calculate on exit. Let me do that again. I think I screwed that up. Yeah, Power Make GIFs. And yes, add. No, add. And we're good. And then we have power manage digital assets, wrench, multiple choice, double-click, power manage digital assets. And see, there's— I just hit the end, like it won't let me type any more characters. So I might take the manage out so I can put in the word assets. I'll know what that means. And then up here, I'm going to go yes, add, no, add. Click OK. And then finally, just an A/B box. And that's going to be acknowledgement county. Calculate on exit. Okay, now before I keep, before I go any further, I'm going to go back and I'm going to go through and make sure that I checked calculate on exit on all these. And make sure that I had a name added to each of them. Because it ain't, it's not going to work if that stuff is not right. And it's a good idea just to go back and make sure that everything is what you thought you did. If you don't have the calculate on exit, it will not allow you to use that thing anywhere else. And it looks like I did a good job, but I've learned not to trust myself. And okay, we're good. So save, save, save. Now, the first— my approach to this is I'm going to have some logical stuff, you know, text that's going to come in or out depending on something. And I'm gonna have some fill points and I'm gonna have some calculated stuff, right? And by calculated stuff, I would say like the pronouns, like the he, she, him, her, his, her. So the best thing to do in my estimation is to go in and do all the simple stuff first. For example, fill in blanks. Now, Up here, if I double-click, you can see this is called client name. The question is, how do I reuse this? If they answered up here, how do I get the answer to show up elsewhere? And it's a little weird. You don't use these buttons anymore. Okay? So if I want to replace this with client name, then I gotta go to a field. And I mentioned earlier that you might want to add the field insert a field to your quick access toolbar. But here's how you get to it otherwise. Insert, Quick Parts button, and down to field. Insert, Quick Parts, field. And I click on that. And the, the field that you want to use is called a ref field. So I click on ref. And you will see over here that all the fields that I set up, uh, appear. So in this case, this is obviously going to be client name. So I click on client name, but I'm not done yet because as you can see, this is going to need to be in all caps. So I can go right over here under format and I can choose uppercase. All right. So I'm going to say ref client name. Format it in uppercase. Click OK. I want you to note what just occurred. Looks like something's there, but I can't see it. So this is the next super important thing that you need to know and turn on when you're doing these forms. And that is I need to turn on the reveal fields function, which is Alt+F9. And you'll notice that everything changed when I did that. These became form text, form dropdown, and down here I could actually see. I'm going to toggle that off again. Um, Alt+F9. So if you don't do this, you can't even see the field you just put in. But so I need this on when I'm building the template, but I need to turn it off before I test it or use it. Okay. So Alt+F9 on and off. So I turn that on. Now I'm just going to tell you some stupid things I learned about this. If I leave it like this, even though this is clearly bold, when I test it, I'll put in like John A. Doe up here and then I'll come down here and the word John will be in bold, but A Doe will not be in bold. Okay. And so the first time I encountered this little weirdness, weird issue. I thought, well, maybe I did something wrong. And I redid the whole thing again. I kept trying it. Nope. It will inconsistently not make everything you entered up here formatted the way it should obviously be formatted. And it looks like it would be formatted. And this is what I found. So if you want formatting to apply to the reuse of a data field, then you must do the following. Select the data field. And what I wanna do is toggle the formatting on and off that is already applied. So you can see it's bold, right? I wanna, watch what happens when I turn the bold off. A new word's gonna appear here in the middle. Turn it off, turn it on. Now, when I did that, this new thing, merge format, appears. You need that. And it does not appear. Let me see if I can make that go away. Yeah. So before, all I had was this little slash code puts in, obviously makes it all uppercase. In order to get this to work properly and get the formatting that I want, first I have to select it. And then I gotta turn the bold on and off. I just toggle it on and off. And that's gonna make this merge format show up. But there's one extra thing that you have to do to make this work. And by the way, this is in the materials that you'll have, right? All these stupid little rules that I'm going through, they're in the materials. I need to get on the other side of that merge format. And I need to do this: space, slash, asterisk, space, char format. C-H-A-R-F-O-R-M-A-T. Why do I have to do that? I couldn't tell you. But if you put the char format in there, it will hold its formatting. And I know you're probably going, are you kidding me? No, I'm not. I'm not kidding you. I know it's ridiculous, but you got to do that. So I have ref client name. That was the bookmark. Make it uppercase. This popped in because I simply toggled bold on and off. And then I got to put— and there's a space here and there's a space here, but this is a slash star char format. And then there's a space between that and the bracket on the right side. And I know that seems nuts, but that works. So now, oh, and by the way, this is actually a tech support question I've had many times. Okay, I'm in Word and instead of seeing the page number, I see the word page. What did I do? You hit Alt+F9. So watch if I hit Alt+F9, what happens to my page number? There. See, now it's a 1. Now it's the underlying field. What this is telling me is the page numbers in Word are actually just a field. And you could insert those manually if you care to ever try this. If you click on Insert Quick Parts Field, there's a field in here called Page. And if you insert that into your header or footer, you can insert page numbering in that manner as well. You don't have to use the page number buttons. You just drop this in any place you want. It would count page numbers. Anyway, scroll down, and here we are again. So I got to use client name again. So I'm gonna go back to Quick Parts. By the way, again, I'm on the Insert ribbon. Insert ribbon to get to Quick Parts. Then I go down to Ref. I find client name. In this case, I don't need it to be in all caps. So I'm not gonna change its format. I'm just gonna click OK. However, I do need it to be bold and not just the first name, all the middle initial and the last name as well. So I select it again and I go bold off, bold on. Merge format magically appears. I hit space slash star slash. Space, char format. Okay. And then I got another one here. This is an Illinois power of attorney, so I'm gonna assume it's always gonna be Illinois, but I do need to put in a variable for client city. So I go insert, quick parts, field, ref, and that's gonna be client city. Okay, and since there's no formatting applied to this, I'm done with that. I don't need to put in char format or toggle bold on and off or any of that junk. Then I need initial agent relationship. So I select this and I go Quick Parts, Field, Ref, IA Relationship. Okay. Now I'm going to need the stupid CHAR format again. So initial agent name. So I go Quick Parts, Field. And by the way, I'm just typing REF really fast, and that's why it's taking me down here so I didn't have to scroll down that big list. IA name. Okay, here we go again. Select it, toggle bold on and off, off, on. Go over here, slash star char format, space. Okay, and then I go here, I select this, and I'm going to go insert quick parts field, and that's going to be— what was I on? City. IA City. I come over here, And I'm gonna go Quick Parts Field, Ref IA State. And now later, we're gonna come back. They might not answer the relationship, right? And if you didn't answer the relationship, I don't want it to say end of point, you know, blank comma, you know, John Doe. I don't want this to appear. I don't want the comma to appear and I don't want the space after it to appear. We'll come back and make that conditional later. For now, let's keep going down and doing the easy stuff. Okay, so here I've got these optional provisions and they include trust name. So I'm going to go in here and go Quick Parts, Field, Ref, choose trust name. Now, you can copy these, right? So now that I put that in once, I could copy that. And I could come down here and paste. You don't have to keep doing that over and over again. All that's good. Okay, now I get down to the successor agent stuff. So let's fill this in. Quick Parts, field, ref. And that's going to be SA relationship. And then I get this. Quick Parts, field, ref SA name. Okay, not done. Got to select it. Got to make it bold on/off. Get to the end, slash star char format, space. There's a space right here too. I just want to make sure. Yep. So then I go SA City, Quick Parts, Field, Ref, SA City, go. And I go here and I go Quick Parts, Field, Ref, SA State. Now we're getting somewhere. Now I've already done this, right? I've already done the char format crap. So I'm just going to go find that earlier in the document. That was up here. I client name char format, blah, blah, blah. Copy that. And I can go back down to where I was. And I can just paste that in. Paste and paste and paste. And paste. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Okay, so where was I? I was down in the acknowledgement stuff. Okay, so I got— this is going to be a calculated thing. I'm going to come back and do that later. This I did have a variable for. So that's going to be Quick Parts field, ref, and that's going to be Acknowledgement County. And that needs to be all caps, uppercase. Okay. But there's no formatting applied. There's not bold, italic, or anything else. The case is not formatting. So I don't need to worry about that. Pronouns. And then down here I have IA name. And let me just show you another thing you can do. I can always take this, copy it, come over here and paste it, and switch this to IA. Again, you can, you can edit these fields. It's not like they have to be inserted by the manner of using the buttons. You can always just go in and just type it, copy and paste, type it. This will work just fine. Ref I/A name. We're good. And that's it for the easy stuff. Now we're going to get into the weeds just a little bit. Let's do— the easiest stuff is going to be the pronouns first. So let's go do the pronouns. Now I want to— well, you know, before we do that, let's talk about testing. Because you're going to want to test this as you go. So thus far, I've only just created the fill points. So if I want to make sure that those are working properly, then here is the process you have to go through in order to test. I cannot test while I'm in the form. Okay, let me repeat that. Don't try to test it while you're editing the form. You'll make a mess for yourself. So this is what I have to do. First, save it just to make sure you've saved it as far as what you've done to this point. Then I'm going to go to the developer ribbon again. Remember we were here and clicking this stuff? We're going to use a different button now. We're going to tell it to restrict editing. Now before I do that, I'm going to toggle off my field code. So I'm going to hit Alt+F9 again. Again. Remember that was what— so now it goes back to just the plain fields. If I go back down and look at the document, I won't be able to see the fill— like for the name has disappeared, right? So I turned off Alt+F9. And you'll know you've turned it off. Again, if it's on, it'll say form text and form dropdown. If it's off, you're just going to see blanks. All right. So but in the same developer ribbon, I clicked on restrict editing. And I'm going to come over here and say, only allow this type of editing. Check that box. And the type of editing you want to allow, filling in forms. Okay. So I go to the Developer ribbon. I clicked restrict editing. I tell it only allow filling in forms. And it's going to say, okay, yes, start enforcing protection. When I click on that, it's going to ask me for a password. Don't put one in. Don't put in a password. Just click OK. Now this thing is locked up. Here's what that effectively does. It will make it so that the user can only tab from field to field. They cannot type anywhere else in the document. They can only just answer the questions. Okay? And I want to make this as easy as possible. So when they launch a new one, this is where they go. So I can I can go save and then I close it. Now here is my Illinois statutory power of attorney form. In order to test it, let me back up and make sure I'm clear about this. First, I toggled off Alt+F9. Then I told it to restrict editing, only allow someone to fill in a form. Then I clicked go ahead and start enforcing the protection. I did not put a password on it. Then I saved it and I closed it. Now I go to wherever it is that you stored this thing. And to test it, you double-click it. And you'll notice that I get— it's going to land me right here at the beginning. So I can type. I'll just do this for me. Baron K. Henley in Chicago. My wife, Jodi Henley in Chicago. Illinois. Oh, and so this reminds me, we're going to default this to Illinois. And we're going to default this to Illinois. I forgot to do that. But that's— this brings it to my attention. So this would be my daughter, Ariel Henley, and she's in Phoenix. Oops. Gotta spell right. Arizona. And we'll just go yes, yes, yes. Okay, let's go see. Baron K. Henley. Notice it's all bold. Woo-woo. If I go down here, and the only reason that happened, my wife Jodi, Chicago. I've got a reference error on my cross-references, but I'll go deal with that in a second. Transfer. Did I answer the name of the trust? Maybe I didn't. Oh no, I didn't. Okay. Henley, gotta answer all the questions. Henley Family Trust. And we'll say this is Cook County. I might default that as well. I think that's Chicago. So anyway, I'll tab out of that field. And now let's see what we get here. I'll come down and I'll show you how to solve that problem. Henley Family Trust. That's good. I got all kinds of errors in here. My daughter, Ariel of Phoenix, Arizona. My name. Cook County in caps. Perfect. Okay. So I'm happy. My cross-references are messed up, but I'll show you how to fix that. So I close that. I don't save it. And now I want to go back in and actually edit the template. So I don't double-click it. I right-click and I choose Open. And that's going to reopen the same form. Now, in order to do anything to this thing, I got to turn off the protection. So if you don't see this window open, click on Developer, click on Restrict Editing, and say Stop Protection. It immediately turns it off because I didn't put in a password. Now, before I do anything else, I hit Alt+F9. Now, let me actually, let's go down and look at those cross-references. What's the deal with my cross-references? Okay. So this is supposed to say paragraph 2 or 3 below. So because I have in here, I've used automatic paragraph numbering. All you have to do is click on Insert and Cross-reference. And then I can pick 2, insert. And this is going to be 3. So I go 3, insert. And then, and the reason I'm doing this is because I want them to update automatically. That one appears to be okay already. Let me hit F9 and make sure it's right. Yep. Strikeout paragraph 4. Yeah, that's going to be a reference to 4. So I'm just going to go back to the same thing, 4, insert. And then down here, that's going to be 5 and 6. And it's going to be 6. And that 8 looks okay. 8, 8, 9, 9. Okay, the rest of them are right. All right, so that problem is solved. Now, I hit Alt+F9 so I can see my fields. And remember I said I wanted to make a default. I just want to show you how to do that. So like initial agent state, if I double-click that, see they have a default text up here. So I could type in Illinois. And now they can pick something else, they type something else. It'll just be prefilled with that. And then if I come down to successor agent state, I'll make that also Illinois. Okay. All right. So the easiest thing to do are pronouns. So we're going to go down to our pronouns that were down in the acknowledgement. There we go. Okay. Now, this gets a little squirrely. And that's because there's no button to click. There's not, it's not object-oriented. You have to type this stuff. So there's a couple more things you're going to need to know how to do. The first thing is, in order to insert a field, you have to hit Ctrl+F9. Now let's, let me be clear. Let's, let's write these down. Alt+F9 toggles field codes. So I can either see them or not see them. And while I'm using it, while I'm editing the template, I want that turned on. Control+F9 inserts a field. And now you're going, well, didn't you just insert a bunch of fields by hitting Quick Parts and down to field? Yeah, but this is a custom field. There's no, there's no option for this stuff I'm about to do. So let me get rid of that stuff. So I go up here, I'm just going to leave the stuff in there that's already there. And, and I go Ctrl+F9. And here's— watch what happens. I get those weird little brackets in a field. So here's what I do. I go IF, all caps, space, and then I drop in another Ctrl+F9. If you remember what we called that, it was client gender. And then I get on the other side of this. I hit space, equal, space, in quotes, male, quote, space, quote, he, quote, space, quote, she, quote. Okay, now let me press pause and explain the syntax here. If client gender, and if you can't remember what you called it, you need to go look. Like this is, This has to be exactly what you call that field. So if you're not sure, then you might have to go up to the top and look at this field and double-click it. This is what I'm testing on right there. So I gotta make sure, it's case sensitive and everything sensitive. So no space, capital C, capital G. Okay, so if you're confident that's what you got, so that's what I typed, client gender. There's a space here. There's a space here, here, right before the client. There's a space. So there's a space here. There's a space after client gender, space, equal, space. And then, so the way the syntax works in an if statement is if test, what do you want if it's true? What do you want if it's false? Okay, so if test is male, if client gender equals male, that's my test. Then give me the word he, and otherwise give me the word she. And that will calculate, we'll test it of course, but that'll calculate the pronoun. Now once you get your first one done, you don't have to keep doing this over and over again. Select the one you already did, copy it, paste it down here, and this is going to be his and her. You can absolutely copy and paste and mess with the fields. So I scroll down. So let me do that again the hard way. I hit Ctrl+F9 and I typed IF in all caps, space, add another field, Ctrl+F9. What are you testing on? Client gender, space equals space, male. He, she. It all has to be in quotes. There's a space between each one. There's no comma, space. You can see why, you know, again, if it were easy, everybody'd do it. Now you're learning why not everybody does this, and we haven't even got to the hard part yet. So I'm going to paste that in and switch that up to his and her. Now I probably have these elsewhere. Didn't I have another one? Oh, maybe I didn't. Okay. So I think my pronouns are going to work. Let's test, right? Don't assume. Test. So again, what's the process for testing? Save the stupid thing. Turn off Alt+F9. Hit save again. Go to your developer ribbon. Click on restrict editing. Tell it. I only want to do filling in forms. Yes, enforce protection. Don't put in a password. Click OK. Save your, your form and close it. If you want to test, you got to double-click. Double-click. Actually, let's make this, I'll make this Jody's, and she's in Chicago, and I'll make this female. And let's go see if that worked. Look at that. That is beautiful. She and her. So if I come back up here and I switch this to me, Male. Let's go look. And we are happy. His, her, he, his. Okay. So, so far so good. We close that. File, Close, don't save. Then again, to edit my template. I must right-click and choose open. And then once the thing is open, I gotta go stop protection. I like to just get this out of my face because it's taking up a bunch of space. And then hit Alt+F9. Now I can see the stuff. Okay. The first slightly harder thing we need to deal with is this relationship issue. I may not have a relationship. They may not answer it. Okay, this is— I'm just gonna tell you a little thing I found out by just experimentation. If you do not answer a question, it doesn't give you an error message in the document. Instead, it inserts— I have no idea why this is the case— exactly 5 spaces. Okay, so I can, and I, and appoint, I can select all of that. So I'm being very specific here. I appoint, I don't want it to bring in the ref relationship or the common space after it. If this, if they don't answer this, I wanted to say and appoint, you know, John Doe of whatever city and state. So I didn't just select this field. I selected the field plus the comma space. Once you get that all selected, then you're going to insert a field on top of it by hitting Ctrl+F9. And I type if, and then I hit Ctrl+F9 again. What am I testing on? If I, A, relationship. Okay, now here's the tricky part. I get outside that field, hit a space. Now I want to, I want to test on, um, it not being blank. So I say if less than greater than space quote 1 2 3 4 5 spaces close quote. In other words, it's not blank, then space, put quotes around your field. Notice where my— I'm going to be— I want the comma and the space, then a quote, space, quote quote. Okay, let me explain this. If the relationship is not 5 spaces, this hit a line break so you can't tell, but there's 5 spaces in there. Then put in the relationship because they answered it. Plus a comma and a space. And if they, if it is 5 spaces, then don't do anything. In other words, don't give me 5 spaces. Well, if there's nothing between the quotes, it doesn't put anything in. I hope that made sense. So Now, like, that's a little complicated. Let's give it a test. So again, I hit Alt+F9 to turn off my fields. I go back into the Review ribbon— I mean the Developer ribbon. I go to Restrict Editing. I say Start Enforcing Protection. I click OK. I hit Save. I hit Close. And then I double-click to test. So Barron, Chicago. Let's say I don't answer that. Jodi Henley. I appoint— notice, whoops, notice there's no extra spaces in there. There's not 5 spaces, not a comma. I appoint Jodi Henley. Now if I go back up here and I say my wife And I go down and look. I hope— hopefully it inserted it. And look, it did. Okay. So close that. Don't save it. Right-click and open. Stop the protection. Hit Alt+F9. And we can proceed. So, and oh, by the way, if you send me an email, I can send you this entire form all completely automated, and you'll be able to go in and look at the fields and see how they were constructed and play around with it and test it and whatever you want to do. Just send me an email. I'll never email you anything ever again. I'm not a spammer. I'll just send you this. So now let's try making a whole paragraph. So this is the fund trust. And then amend trust. This is a little weird too. I'm going to take out those options there. So if you want to make a whole paragraph optional, you got to select the whole paragraph. And then you're going to hit Ctrl+F9. Before I do that, I want to make sure I remember what I called that. Power fund trust and power amend trust. Okay. So I select the whole thing. I hit— now, this is really weird. I'm going to hit Ctrl+F9. And notice the paragraph number disappeared. The first time I ever did this, I'm like, what the heck happened to my paragraph numbers? And I thought it was broken. It wouldn't work. Actually, when you test it, the paragraph numbers come back, even though they appear to be gone and this appears to be broken. So again, it's goofy how this whole thing works. So if I say if— space, Ctrl+F9 again. What am I testing on? Power Fund Trust. Get on the other side of this. Space, equal, space, yes, space. Then give me the thing that I selected. Now here's the weird part. Where my cursor goes to finish this. I don't go here. I come all the way down here and I type quote. That closes the— I want that whole paragraph. And notice that included the hard return at the end right here. If you don't get that, then you're gonna— all your paragraphs are gonna run together. And then what happens if they didn't answer it or if they said no? Then I want quote quote. I don't want anything. So that looks completely broken, I know. Let's test it. So we'll go back to our Developer ribbon, Restrict Editing. Oh wait, I got to hit Alt+F9 first. And as you can see, the paragraph that I selected is now missing in action. Start enforcing protection. Okay. Save. File, Close. Double-click. And let's just run down. This is the one that I was referring to. So let's say I said no. Okay. Notice amend trust, that was the next one. And the power to fund the trust, which is above it, is not there. And my paragraph number magically came back. Okay, so they're still numbering correctly. So that is pretty weird. Like, it looked like it was totally not going to work. And it actually did work. Let's go add the paragraph back in. So if I say yes, hopefully the paragraph will reappear. Look at that. Uh-huh. That's what I'm talking about. I just didn't answer the name of the trust, which is why that's still blank. Right? So I just keep doing that. I'm done with this test. Close. Don't save. Right-click. Open. Back in it. Turn off the protection. Hit Alt+F9. And I know this is kind of repetitive and a little bit annoying. But when it's all done, it's awesome. And it makes this so easy to use. Now, here's the tricky part. I'm going to make this next paragraph Conditional. So this is power amend trust, right? So I go ahead and I select the whole thing, but not— I don't get any of these fields here. I just start here to here. Then I hit Ctrl+F9. I say if, and then I hit Ctrl+F9. I say power amend trust. Get on the other side of that. Space equals space. Yes. Then quote, put in all that junk. End quote, space, quote quote. Get rid of my paragraphs there. Make sure that's a— hang on a second, let me back that out. Styles, that heading 2. Okay. Delete all that. Make that heading 2. Okay, so it's going to look like that. So I get the next one, which was to make gifts. I guess I could go ahead and get rid of all this stuff. Select that, Ctrl+F9. If, Ctrl+F9. Power, what did I call that again? Power. Power Make GIFs. Get on the other side of the code field, space, equal space, yes, then put in all that junk. Quote, space, quote, quote, select the last paragraph. I'll get rid of my digital assets here. And Control+F9. If, Control+F9, Power Digital Assets, I think that's what I called it, equals, let's make sure that's what I call it, Power Digital Assets, yep, equals yes, then quote, bring in all that junk, quote space quote quote. Okay, does it work? Who knows. Alt+F9, turn off my fields. Developer ribbon, restrict editing, start enforcing protection, yes. Hit save, file close, back to the double-click. Okay, they're all yes, yes, yes. Let's see if they— tab, tab, tab, tab, tab. Let's make sure they all are in here. Look at that. That is amazing. And if I go up and we'll turn off the bottom 2. No, no. I should only have 2 of 4. Okay. So we're working. Close that. Don't save. Right-click. Open. Okay, so I just keep doing that, right? And so if I go down to the— let me hit stop protection and Alt+F9 again so I can work. So down here, this is my next piece of logical stuff. I would simply take out my, my codes here. And let's say, remember, there's a yes/no here. And if I say yes to I want to include the relationship, the successor agent. Now, the first thing I would do, and we're running out of time here, I only have 6 minutes left. So I can't do all of this stuff. But what I want to show you how to do is I want to test on if they said yes, remember, there's a question at the top that said, is there a successor agent. And I called that— what'd I call that? Successor power IA— appoint successor. So I called it appoint successor, and that was a yes/no. And here's what I want. If they say yes, then I want the junk to come in with a period at the end. If they say no, then I want it to say, to as successors to such agent colon And then I just want these lines. Okay. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select from here to here. And I'm going to make that conditional on a yes. Nice. And again, I called that appoint successor. So I hit Ctrl+F9. If Ctrl+F9, appoint successor. Get on the other side of that. Space equals space. Yes. Then put in space relationship name blah blah blah blah blah period. Okay, and then when I get to the end of that, which is going to be here, quote, then I want it to say, what do you want it to put in if they say no? I want a colon right there and maybe And that's all I need. So my test is if a point successor equals yes, then put in all the junk with a period at the end. Otherwise, I want a colon. I hope that makes sense. So if I hit Alt+F9 and I toggle that off, and I hit save, developer ribbon, restrict editing, turn it on, yes, save again, file close, double-click. So if I say no, let's see what we get there. Scroll down and look at our successor agent deal. Ah, look at that colon. So if I go back up and I say yes, let's put it in my daughter, Ariel Henley of Chicago. Okay, let's go look and see if it put in my daughter's information. Boom, with a period at the end. And then with all I'd have to do with this is select it and make those 3 lines conditional on they said no to that same exact thing. Okay, close. Right-click, open, stop protection, go away. Alt+F9. Now the only other thing, and the instructions on how to do this are in the manual. The only other thing is, and I don't know if you noticed this, but at the bottom when I went to the last field here, I double-clicked it. I wanted you to notice that there it says run macro on entry or exit. So what I did was, and the script for the macro is actually in the materials that I am providing to you. And the instructions on how to do this are also in the instructions. So if I do— hang on a second, I'm just going to make a copy of it and edit. There we go. So this is the script for the macro. And this is in the— you can literally copy and paste this. So what I'm going to do is You know, a macro is a bunch of recorded steps in a word processor typically. But this can't be recorded. And in Word macros are actually Visual Basic for Applications, a programming language code. If you simply copy and paste this script, which you— I will, again, I will provide, into a macro, then you can put that macro. So here's what I did. I want to record a macro.. I want to call it Unlock Form. So I go to the View ribbon, Macro, and Record. And I call it Unlock Form. And down here, where do you want to store the macro? I want to put it in the template, in the Illinois statutory power of attorney form. And all I do is I say OK. And then I go right back to Macro and I say Stop Recording. Then I go Macro, View Macros. I edit that macro. And all I do is I go in here and I paste in that code. That's it. That'll work. So now I have a macro that has this fancy stuff in it. Then I hit Save and Close. And now, in order for this to work, I need to select the entire table that I put up here at the top. And I need to put a bookmark. I need to insert a bookmark called test, just capital T-E-S-T. So I go Insert, Bookmark, Test, Add. And now I go down to the acknowledgement county. And I say, on exit, I want you to run unlock Form. There. That's the macro I just created. So what that's going to do is it's going to automatically replace all of the fields with static text. So I don't have these goofy shaded fields anymore. And I'm going to go— so I got to go back to Developer, Restrict Editing, Start Enforcing Protection. Okay. Save. And close. And now I can double-click it. So here I am in my form. I'm not going to answer all these questions, but Chicago, and it's gonna be my wife Jody, Chicago, Ariel, uh, let's say no, just make this faster. No. Yes, yes. Henley Family Trust. This is gonna be Cook. Now watch, now if this works, and if it doesn't, forgive me. I'm doing this really fast. When I hit tab, the whole table's gonna disappear and all the fields are gonna be replaced with static text. Ready? Tab. And hey, what do you know? It worked. Okay, so that's just kind of a clean way to like get rid of the data table. You could leave it in there, of course, and just manually delete it. But that macro does some pretty cool stuff. And now you can make any further edits to this document you need to make. So if you, if again, if you have problems with that, if you're trying to do this on your own, you can always, let me put my contact information here again. And I'll make that bigger. Feel free to shoot me an email, and I'm glad to help. I hope you got at least a good idea of what's possible here. And I hope you have the courage to try it on your own. I know it's a little intimidating if you haven't done that kind of stuff before. But again, once it's set up, it just works perfectly. So it's worth, it's worth trying to get it there. Thank you for attending, and I hope that was useful. Thanks.