Help Center / Videos / How to Select Chapters for Your Document /

See more videos and subscribe to the Proposal Kit YouTube channel

In this video we're going to demonstrate how you select the list of chapters that is going to get built into your document. This is a general–purpose video for any document that can be created with any version of our Wizard software. The Expert Edition or the Novice Edition.

It will work for any document whether it's a business proposal, contract, business plan, a report, a study and so on and with any of our design themes. So we have a design theme selected so whatever design theme out of the hundreds we have available that you purchased will be your selected style. And for every time you're going to create a new document you just go into that button to create a new project.

And this project name is just going to be whatever title you want to give it. This doesn't get put into any documents. Then you go into the Pick Documents screen.

So this is the screen that gives you access to all the thousands of individual chapter templates. Now those chapter templates are anything from general purpose templates like the Cover Letter, Title Page, Back Page, Table of Contents and so on that most people are going to use. And there are also industry specific chapters.

There are chapters specific to whether you're writing a business plan or a grant RFP submission and so on. So the first screen you come to Add Templates you'll see the 40 most common chapters in general use. So for a very simple basic business proposal you could actually find all the chapters you need on this one screen.

So like a Cover Letter, Title Page, Back Page, Introduction or Executive Summary. These can be used interchangeably, Executive Summary is usually a little more formal than an Introduction. And then like a Cost Summary page, the Company History page.

If you're selling a product or service let's say we're selling some services. That seven pages is going to cover a basic proposal for most companies. Now let's go to the remove templates tab.

Let's just take a look. You remove chapters from your selected list. This View and Reorder Select Templates button.

That will bring up a similar screen. You can still remove chapters from the list but you can also change the order. Let's move Services up first.

So anytime you want to check your actual list of chapters you can just click this button. It'll tell you how many you've selected. You'll see two lists here so this list here on the left this is all the chapters that are going to be assembled into a single Word document, your Combined Project Document.

This list over here is for any extra documents you're adding to the project that are going to be kept as individual separate files. So these would be things like a legal contract you want to have separate from the document or check lists or extra letters like a follow–up letter. So they will show up here.

So on this Add Templates tab you can click this drop down and this will take you to lists of chapters that are more specific to a situation and it will change the checkboxes you'll see. So if you're going to use the Web/IT/Software/Hardware page you'll see now that these are technical chapters. And then we can also scroll this way using these previous/next buttons.

So let's say we're doing a real estate document. You can see a lot of real estate related chapters here. You'll see industry specific lists of chapters first.

You can see types of documents listed next. So say for writing a service sales proposal we can start looking at those then we get into product and sales related chapters, project related chapters, business plan related chapters, grant specific chapters, government chapters, short quote, some bids and so on. Now if you scroll even further down we have them categorized by types of information.

So say if you want general information pages. What if you want some intellectual property related chapters. You can find those here and so on.

The appendix chapters, if we need to talk about problems or negative things we'll find a few pages. So this is how you can kind of quickly get through lots of chapters and kind of pick out topics you think you might need. Now if you have the idea of a chapter or topic you need to talk about but you don't know where to find it exactly if you can think of the word you're looking for you can do a Search by Name.

So say I want an Income Projection chapter. Let's just search on the word projection. So as long as the word we're typing in here is in the title or description or in the tags you'll find it.

So yeah, we do have an Income Projection chapter. There's also a Projections chapter and then chapters that might be related. So now we can add an Income Projection to our project.

What if I need a Mission Statement? We'll just search on the word mission and you'll see the Mission Statement right here but you'll see all the other chapters that have mission as a partial search will show up as well. And then all the chapters that were tagged as related to these ones that were found will be showing up as well so you have a longer list. You can kind of scroll through so you see templates like Leadership, Vision, Principles, Best Practices, Charter, Core Values, Position Statement.

Those are topics that would tie in with a Mission Statement so lets add in a Vision as well. So we have two selected. We add those you can see them in our project list here.

So that is how to use the Add Template, Search by Name, Remove Templates tabs. Now View Samples, this is a quick way to get a lot of chapters into your project all at once. So I'll go over here and we'll just remove everything we've selected so far, start from scratch.

So say we've come into the Pick Document screen. We kind of know a certain situation we're in and we can just look through these samples and we do have one of our animal design themes selected. So let's say we're doing a proposal probably for a veterinarian service or something so we're probably going to pick a sample that's related to the design theme and the type of business we're in.

So you can see we have an Animal Rescue Shelter Sponsorship example. Let's just select that and just say Import Content from Selected Sample. You see that instantly loaded our project with a list of 13 chapters and using those other tabs Search by Name, Add Templates, Remove Templates we can alter this list.

Now pulling in a sample not only do you get the list of chapters but when you leave this box checked it will actually pull in the text of the sample into the document that gets assembled. So let's take a look at the sample really quick. As you can see this list of chapters and it's been pulled into our project.

Now all of this pre–written text in the sample is actually going to get pulled into the document when we generate it. Now this is a different design theme than what we have selected. This is our Animals #2 design theme that the sample is created with but we have a photo design theme Animals #5 in our Wizard right now is our selected design theme.

So this exact sample can get recreated in whatever design theme you purchased. This is the power of the Wizard software and the template library, the design theme library is it will let you create a document with lots of different variations in the design theme and the chapters and the data. So we'll close that sample now.

The Add a Contract tab. This is only for use if you have the Professional Expert Edition that includes the library of Contract Packs or if you have an individual Contract Pack product purchased instead of a single Proposal Pack. So the Add a Contract tab is only for if you have a template product with contracts.

So we have this loaded up with the Professional Edition that has over 300 contract templates. So I can just add any of these to the project. Say Work for Hire Agreement and you'll notice there's some checkboxes here that let us decide if we want the contract embedded in the project document or proposal or created as an external document.

So we have this box checked so the contract will be created separately. So we'll add this to the project and you can see the contract over here in this box. Now the Presets tab, this is good for creating your own custom lists of chapters that you want to keep reloading over and over again for future documents you are going to create.

So say if you have a set list of templates you're always going to use for every project and you don't want to have to take the time going through these screens and re–finding and rechecking everything off for every document. So once you do this the first time you know say we have our 14 selected and we're going to use those for all our future proposals. We can go in here and create a preset.

Lets say My Custom List, give it whatever title you want, create a preset. Now your preset is right here on the drop–down so in the future after we create this first document say later we're going to create another one. It's the same set chapters we just come into the presets tab select that preset click the load button and all 14 chapters get loaded right away.

And you can still after that customize the list say for a future project you need to add an extra page or two. Now this Title Page tab, this is just for changing the front cover design and it's only for if you're using the Proposal Pack for Any Business design theme that's the plain text version, non–branded without logos. So if you have a design theme that already has a photo or a line art graphic design theme to it you're not going to use these Title Page Packs.

But if you did use one with the Any Business style you just go in and select a Title Page Pack. Now we have all 40 loaded here. You only get Volume #1 with an entry level Proposal Pack and you get five of these with the Professional.

So all others are a small eight dollar fee each. So let's say we just go into Volume #1 because everybody will have Volume #1 and if you try to load this title page button up and you have a visual design theme it will warn you because basically you'll wind up creating a document that has a mismatched looking front cover page. You can just select whichever one of the five designs are in that Title Page Pack.

Select a premade design theme and that would set the color scheme for the whole document and import this as the front title page. But we're not going to do that with this Animals #5 design theme. And if you do select a title page design and you need to go back to the stock design theme you can just click this Use Original Title Page button that will undo anything you did in this tab.

Now this Quick Start tab, this is great if you have a specific kind of business or project that you need to load up a set of chapters for and you just want to quickly get loaded up with a set of chapters. There are hundreds and hundreds of pre–made lists here that we've built up over the years working with companies. So you can find premade lists of chapters for lots of different situations and industries and you just use the Search Import Lists here or this drop–down to narrow the list down.

So say if I only want to look at premade lists that are construction related. I can just click that top drop–down that narrows the list from hundreds and hundreds down to something a little more manageable. Then I can just scroll down and look at all these in alphabetical order.

So say for a woodworking contractor or something. Now in this example you know we have an animal design theme. Let's just search on the word animal and see what we find for premade lists.

We should find a veterinarian or shelter type layout. Animal rescue that might be a good one. So this would actually load a similar set of chapters to the actual sample over here and you can see if we highlight it will load up 15 templates.

You can search this import list for just about anything. So say if you are a medical related company you probably would have bought a medical related design theme. You need to be searching for medical related layouts.

You can see a whole bunch to select from. And these are just lists of chapters that other companies have used that we've worked with and we have the lists in here so other people can get started with them as their starting lists. But most everybody is going to customize these lists to suit their specific situation.

This will just get you a list of chapters quickly into your project. So say if we are a security company you probably have a security design theme that you purchased or branding with your own logo and the Any Business design. You can see there are a lot more security related layouts to pick from and so on.

So you'll find layouts in here for lots of different specialty situations. So we have our 14 selected and we can build our document from it next. So this is how you use the Pick Documents screen and all of these tabs are just different ways of getting a list of X number of chapters into your project for a situation specific to what you are doing.

And you can get started faster finding something similar using the View Samples or Quick Start tabs and then custom tailoring that list using Add Templates, Search by Name, Remove Templates and then once you're done you just go back click the OK, Use Selected Templates button. You're back on the project screen and you are ready to build the document. There are also many other videos that will go into other details in how to use these things such as the presets, how to customize the design themes, how to build a document from a sample and so on.

So this video is just going to focus on how to use that Pick Documents screen to get a list of chapters. But now that we've done that we can just build the document by clicking the OK, Save Project button. And then just let the Wizard start generating the document.

So what it's doing now is that list of chapters that you've picked from the Pick Document screen are all being assembled into a document and copied into a folder for this project. Okay, now the document has been generated. You can see we have two documents that put the contract as a separate document.

We can just open both those up here. You can see for the contract it actually applied the Animals #5 design theme. So whatever design theme you have you can have it apply the formatting or you can have it leave this off and just be plain text.

So you have lots of options on how to customize all these documents. And for the full document this is the Animal #5 design theme. So whichever of the hundreds of design themes we have is what it would build it as.

And you can see it actually pulled in the text from that sample and tagged it with the data we put in the Wizard's Company Data screen. So you can see this is how you can use the Wizard to just select a custom set of chapters, a specific design theme, customize the data and settings and have it generate a Word document on the fly that's ready to finish editing and submit. So when you finish with your editing you'd either just print this out or save as PDF and have a document ready to upload, email, deliver however you need.

That is how to use Proposal Pack Wizard to select a set of chapters for your specific situation.