HotDocs Tips & Tricks

Face it: we don’t always upgrade to the latest version of a program. There is the cost of the upgrade, and the cost of “conversion”.  The cost of conversion on HotDocs upgrades has been over-rated.  With HotDocs 2009, you can keep the CMP in the HotDocs 2006-2008 format, ensuring painless upgrades.  However, if you don’t upgrade, some issues can arise.  This is particularly true for those who purchase LexisNexis automated forms or other published form set such as Wealth Transfer Planning.  These programs typically come with a license to “HotDocs Player 2009”.  This is the SAME as HotDocs User (previously HotDocs Standard) with one exception.  It will ONLY run “published form sets” and to publish a form set you need a “publisher’s key” and a special license arrangement with HotDocs corporation.  This is a non-issue if you have HotDocs 2009 (or the latest version).  However, if you don’t you can find that your own firm-developed templates NO LONGER WORK.

Not to be confused with the ASSEMBLE command (which queues a template for assembly after your current template has finished), the INSERT command does exactly that - inserts the content of one template into a different template (known as the “parent” template). 

This instruction is extremely handy and very under utilised as it is useful for a wide variety of things, not just inserting letterhead!

One of the cooler instructions is the ASSEMBLE command, which allows you to queue up a template for assembly in HotDocs.  When it comes to assembling individual documents in packages/batches (as opposed to a template package in a single document output), assemble is the only way to fly.

HotDocs, DealBuilder and GhostFill all work with RTF Templates.  On occasion, a template may include an image for a watermark, a logo, or some other purpose.  Thanks to an ingenious feature of Word, when you some a document to rich-text format (RTF) the images are converted to a useless, but huge windows metafile.  This ensures compatability with ANCIENT word processors, but does nothing for you.  In fact, a simple company logo can expand the size of a short letter from 20K, to 1,200K (or 1.2 MB).  And that is before you start adding text.  The solution is a simple change in the registry for WORD on each machine.