Field Appearance Dialog Box

The Field Appearance dialog box enables you to change how the fields in your template look by choosing different combinations of field appearance properties.

You open the Field Appearance dialog box from the HotDocs Author tab in the Word ribbon.

If you change a setting in the Field Appearance dialog, then decide to revert your change, you must do this manually--the Word Undo feature does not work within this dialog.

Common Tasks

Field Appearance Properties

By selecting check boxes, you can enable any combination of the following properties to choose what HotDocs displays to represent fields in the template:

Property Category What it Does
Placeholder Fields Enables you to select what information HotDocs displays in placeholder fields:
  • Abbreviate placeholders (show only placeholder types) – the placeholder type appears instead of the usual name or expression – when selected, Show Placeholder Types and Show Formats is disabled and not selected; also, advanced property flags do not appear in placeholder fields; Placeholder abbreviate as follows:
    • Text Variable = text
    • Number Variable = num
    • Date Variable = date
    • True/False Variable = TF
    • Single Select Variable = SS
    • Multi Select Variable = LIST MS
    • Auxiliary template = file
    • Image = img
    • Computation = comp
    • Other expression = expr

For template and image placeholders, only File or Img appear.

  • Show placeholder types in addition to names/expressions – does not make any difference to the appearance of template or image placeholders, since these always show their placeholder type
  • Show formats – (Selected by default) If you specify formats, these appear in the field preceded by a colon. This has no effect on template or image placeholder fields
Instruction Fields Enables you to select whether HotDocs displays instruction and expression names in the template:
  • Abbreviate Instruction Fields – when selected, Show List Formats is not selected nor selectable; also, Advanced property flags do not appear, and all instruction fields have an abbreviated appearance, as follows:
    • IF = [?
    • END IF = ?]
    • ELSE and ELSE IF = ?]\[?
    • REPEAT = \[*
    • END REPEAT = *]
    • ASK = \[ask]
    •  ASSEMBLE = \[asm]
    • LANGUAGE = \[lang]
  • Show List Formats on REPEATs – (Selected by default, but disabled when you select Abbreviate Instruction Fields) causes REPEAT instruction format examples to appear in the field preceded by a colon
All Fields Enables you to select what information HotDocs displays for placeholder and instruction fields:
  • Comments – (Cleared by default) Specifies whether comments appear fully expanded, or only as a flag (if comments appear at all)
Field Delimiters Enables you to choose the character HotDocs uses to act as field delimiters (by default, left and right brackets []):
  • Left Field Delimiter – Enables you to choose the appearance of the beginning point of a field
  • Right Field Delimiter – Enables you to choose the appearance of the ending point of a field

Update Fields Check Box

If you manually modified field appearances (for example, using Find and Replace, or using Word's Undo feature to undo a field appearance change) but did not manually undo the change to reflect your appearance preferences, you may find the need to reset your field appearances to your selected preference. The Update Fields check box (in the lower left corner) helps you to do this.

Property Name What it Does
Update Fields Enables you to reset all field appearance to the preferences you set using the properties above. The button has the following states:
  • Clear – Indicates you have not made any changes to field appearances; clicking Save does nothing
  • Selected, but grayed out (disabled) – Indicates you made a change to one of the properties above; clicking Save applies your changes to the fields in your template
  • Selected – Indicates you selected the box; clicking Save re-applies  the current settings to all fields

Leaving the Dialog

At the bottom of the dialog, the following buttons appear:

Options What it Does
Save Saves your current choices, updates the appearance of existing fields, then closes the dialog.
Cancel Discards any changes made. Clicking the Close button (X) in the top right corner is equivalent to clicking Cancel.