Making one document out of several is simple in DocuWare with the "Staple" or "Clip" features. Even merging different file formats is possible. Get to know the differences of these super handy tools.
Attach a delivery slip to an invoice, add a list of participants to the minutes of a meeting: where you would once dig out a stapler or paper clips from your desk drawer, you now simply call up the "Staple" or "Clip" features in DocuWare. These are available in the DocuWare tray for converting two or more documents into a single one before storing.
Here's how:
Select the desired documents in a tray, one after the other, by holding the Control key and then right-click to open the context menu to call up the staple or clip features. The order in which you mark the documents determines the order in which the documents are merged.
Staple vs. clip: Differences, common use, and undoing
Staple: Digital stapler for PDFs and scanned documents
The staple feature is only available for PDFs. From several PDF files in the basket, a single, new PDF file is generated. This is useful, for example, to merge individual scanned pages into a single document.
Of course, you can also unstaple a stapled PDF. This will then divide the document into one-page documents which are numbered consecutively. So if you staple a two-page and a three-page PDF into a PDF with five pages, it will then become five PDFs with one page each when you staple them.
Unstaple also works for documents that have been scanned into the tray as a batch. This allows you to pick apart multi-page documents that were scanned in the wrong order, re-sort them and staple them back together.
Clip: Digital paper clip for different file formats
It’s also possible to clip together documents with different file formats. For example, you can add the list of participants in Excel and the agenda as a PDF to meeting minutes recorded in Word. The individual files remain. If you call up a clipped document in the viewer, you can scroll through the individual files in one go without opening them separately.
As soon as you unclip the document, it will be split into the original files. You can recognize clipped documents both in the tray and in the file cabinet by the document icon with the paper clip.
By the way: If you store an email with attachments and do not save them individually, you will see them as a clipped document.
It is also possible to clip a document from a tray to an already archived one. To do this, call up the clip function via the context menu of the archived document or open a second workspace and drag and drop the document from the basket onto the archived document.
Two documents that have already been stored cannot be clipped – one of them must always be in a tray. Likewise, the unclipping feature is only available in the tray. To retrieve archived documents to a tray, use the "Copy to" function from the context menu of the archived document and select the desired tray.