Seeking Expert Advice on Formatting Issues in Projects

Hello Responsive Community,
We are reaching out to see if any experts in our community have encountered and managed similar formatting issues within Projects. Our team has been facing challenges with reformatting exported proposals, especially those with extensive numbering and bullet points.

If anyone has discovered effective workarounds or tips to save time and reduce the amount of reformatting required within Responsive and upon export, we would greatly appreciate your insights.

Thank you for your support!

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Caitlin Kelterborn

Any tips would be greatly appreciated! This has been such a struggle for our team. Both formatting within Projects as well as upon project export.

Ana Paula Godinho

Hey Community, any tips would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
Ana

Andrew Mersman

@Nick Gehrs would you connect with @Ana Paula Godinho & @Caitlin Kelterborn? We have an open case with Responsive right now around this exact topic. Thanks

Nick Gehrs

@Ana Paula Godinho, @Caitlin Kelterborn We are going through the exact same challenge on our end. For example, if an RFP has roman numerals or bullets (even worse if there is a mix of the two), we typically have to reconstruct the entire exported document to match how it was formatted and listed in the main RFP. This takes hours upon hours of our time, sometimes full days doing only this. I've been working with the engineering team at Responsive over the last couple of weeks trying to update our templates. Not much has helped to this point, but they are currently taking this back to their team, and the recording of our call, to investigate further. I would be open to having a call with you to share some of the things we've done and how we've set up our templates so far and would love to see what you guys do? Thanks!

Nick Gehrs

@Ana Paula Godinho and @Caitlin Kelterborn, just wanted to provide you with an update, in hopes it may help you all and also ask if you have made any progress on this topic.

We were not able to fully resolve the issue, however, Responsive did do a great job getting us a portion of the way there on what we are trying to accomplish. Our main issue was when we had roman numerals or bullet lists in RFPs, the export wasn't matching the format, even down to the indention. What they had us do (so far) is to create a new style that was set up as roman numerals that was formatted to be indented to a length we wanted and then set it up as a question level 2. You would create a new style for bullets as well and likely would have to save these as separate templates, unless you wanted to have one as your default and then update throughout your document after exporting. The downside to this is it doesn't fully match the RFP roman numerals, just the formatting. For example, in Section 1 it would start out with "i" and then number correctly until you get to Section 2, which most times would need to restart as "i", however, the file cannot do that. Instead it just continues the numbering from Section 1 down to Section 2, Section 3 and so on. So, this still creates quite a bit of manual work that we have to do.

Overall… it helped with the formatting, but still work we'd have to do. I am going to post this as an enhancement request in the community, at their request. Happy to chat if you have questions or ideas!

Ana Paula Godinho

Thanks @Nick Gehrs! Appreciate the update! We've also explored the styles features, but we've encountered several formatting issues. I'm adding @Caitlin Kelterborn to this conversation.

Our latest struggle is with reference numbers, which are crucial for our documents. In Word, these reference numbers appear in the format of [1], [2], [3] etc., and are read as merge tags and must be manually adjust them offline one by one. This defeats the purpose of efficiency. Additionally, special characters like the equal or lesser than symbols aren't copying over correctly from Word, turning into squares instead.

Responsive is currently investigating our concern, and we're hopeful there's a solution to mimic Word's formatting within the platform. That would be ideal! Any thoughts on this from your end?