Sharing Text as Snippets

In Contract Tools, snippets are chunks of text that users can quickly add to documents. By default, snippets are limited to those that a user creates. In addition, snippets can optionally include all AutoText that Word loads. If your organization uses standard text in contracts, you can share this text as AutoText in a Word template (DOTX) file, and then your users can work with this text the way they work with snippets.

To share text as snippets:

  1. Create a DOTX file that contains the text you want to share as AutoText. Because snippets are AutoText and are saved in a DOTX file, you can use Contract Tools to do this; see Managing Snippets to learn how. You can also use Word’s built-in controls; see Create reusable text snippets to learn how.

  2. Copy the DOTX file to a location that your users’ computers can access. If you used Contract Tools to create the DOTX file, you can find the DOTX file using Contract Tools: show the Contract Tools pane, click the Preferences button, click Snippets File, and then click the “Show in File Explorer” button (looks like a folder).

  3. Copy the DOTX file to a folder from which Word loads templates on your users’ computers, like Word’s Startup folder; see Load or unload a template or add-in program to learn more. One way to do this is to deploy a script using Group Policy, for example this PowerShell script:

    $filePath = '\\Server\Folder\Shared AutoText.dotx'
Copy-Item $filePath "$Env:APPDATA\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP"

    or this batch script:

    set filePath=\\Server\Folder\Shared AutoText.dotx
copy /b "%filePath%" "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP"

  4. Communicate to your users that they can use your organization’s standard text as snippets by showing the Contract Tools pane, clicking the Preferences button, and then selecting “Include all AutoText and Quick Parts” below Snippets.

Whether snippets include all AutoText and Quick Parts is a user preference, and you can configure default user preferences by modifying PaperSoftwareContractTools.dll.config in Contract Tools’ installation folder (see Installation Folder to learn more) before Word loads Contract Tools for the first time. For example, when Contract Tools is installed for all users on a 64‑bit operating system, you can configure snippets to include all AutoText and Quick Parts with this PowerShell script:

$preferenceName = 'SnippetsViewShowsAllAutoTextAndQuickParts'
$newDefault = 'True'
$installationFolder = "${Env:ProgramFiles(x86)}\Paper Software\Contract Tools"
$absolutePath = "$installationFolder\PaperSoftwareContractTools.dll.config"
$xml = New-Object Xml.XmlDocument
$xml.Load($absolutePath)
$xml.SelectSingleNode("//setting[@name='$preferenceName']").value = $newDefault
$xml.Save($absolutePath)

To learn more about user preferences, see Contract Tools User Preferences.