Managing documents with the Office plugins

In this lesson, we’ll demonstrate how to manage project-level documents using the Upchain for Office plugins. You´ll learn how to modify the document, link it to an item or a BOM, copy it, publish it and make revisions on a published document.

We’ll also briefly touch on how you can use the Office plugins to work with item documents. 

Before you start:

You must be invited to Upchain and have at least a Team license to perform the tasks demonstrated in this lesson. You must also be added to a project to be able to manage documents within that project.

Versioning a document

In this video, we will:

• Check out a document to make changes to it
• Check the document in to commit those changes into Upchain

Key takeaways

1. Checking out a document locks it to you for editing and downloads an editable copy of the document.
2. You must check in a document to commit your changes back into Upchain and create a new file version.
3. It is important to delete the local document after checking it in to ensure you always work with the correct document version.

Linking an item and BOM to a document

In this video, we will:

• Link an item to a document
• Link a bill of materials to a document
• Update the document when updates are made to the item or a bill of materials

Key takeaways

1. Linking an item or a bill of materials to a document means you can update the document every time the item or bill of materials updates.
2. Linking an item to a document can only be done through an Office plugin.

Publishing, revising, and cloning a document

In this video, we will:

1. Send a document to a publishing workflow to be published.
2. Explore the markup capabilities within an Office plugin.
3. Revise a published document.
4. Briefly demonstrate how you would clone a document.

Key takeaways

1. A document can only be published using a workflow that contains a step to publish the document.
2. Published documents can be revised by checking them out and checking them back in again to create a new document version in a Draft state.
3. You can create a clone of a document by downloading it, renaming it on your computer, and uploading it again. This assigns it a new number, maintains all original content, and begins the new document in Draft at version 1.

Modifying item documents

In this video, we will:

• Use an Office plugin to check in a document that belongs to an item
• Access previous versions of a document that belongs to an item

Key takeaways

1. The Office plugins can be used to check in an item document that was checked out from the web application.
2. You can use the Office plugins to download previous versions of an item document.
3. These functions only work for item documents that are compatible with one of the three Office applications.