Advanced document routing

Tech furum

Last time I wrote on a simple topic about how to put appropriate page numbering in Word documents. I was worried whether the technical community will like covering such apparently non-techie topics. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I received very good feedback about the article. Due to popular demand I am covering another very nice functionality in Office called document routing.

I have seen almost everyone not using this feature and missing the benefits completely. In fact, using the content in this article, your messaging system bandwidth usage can be reduced substantially — because instead of sending multiple CCs people can now use Document routing!

Routing refers to sending documents from one person to another for review / approval or reference.

If you have a document which needs to be read, corrected and reviewed by multiple persons, what do you do ? You simply send it as a CC to them. This way the document reaches all of them simultaneously. But if they make changes, they are using a separate copy of the document. When the document comes back to you, you have multiple replies (plus your original documents) with you. Now you need to reconcile who changed what in which document and then incorporate changes manually to make the final document.

Ideally you would have liked the document to be sent to each person one-by-one so that all the changes would be incorporated in a single document. To do this you would have to send the document to the first person in the chain and inform that person to send it to the next person in the reviewer chain. This is dependent upon each person in the chain remembering who the next person is.

This would also be unreliable and difficult to manage.

Would you not like the document itself to remember which recipients it has to go to and in what order? Now is that asking for too much? No. Not at all. All this and more is available in MS Office. Let us see how.

Document routing

When you make any document (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), the routing features are available to you. These features will work if Outlook is properly configured. I will use Word for illustration purposes.

One important concept to understand is that all Office documents can exist in two different modes — Regular and Review mode. In Review mode, changes made by other users do not overwrite the existing content. The original content is marked as deleted and new content is marked as added. This way, the document creator can easily understand the original and corrected content.

1. First, make and save the document as usual.

2. Now choose File – Send to – Routing Recipient from the menu.

3. This dialog tries to pickup the list of contacts in Outlook. If you are using Outlook 2003, there is a safety feature which warns you when any program tries to access your address book. This allows you to prevent viruses from misusing your address book. In this case you want to allow the use of your address book. So click Yes when the following dialog appears.

4. A dialog appears which provides you with all the settings required to route the document.

5. Let us understand how this works. Firstly, you have to choose the email ids of people you want to send the document to. You can either type these or pick them up from the address book.

6. Now you can reorder the persons selected to choose the order in which the document reaches them.

7. Now you decide whether you want to send the document to all of them together or one-by-one. More often you will tend to use the one-by-one option. In either case, the tracking feature of the document is enabled by default. This makes sure that the changes made by reviewers are visible and easy to navigate to.

8. Now, You can type in the subject and body text for the mail. The mail will be created automatically when you close the dialog. If you don’t type anything in the body text for the message, the default content of the mail is as follows:

“The attached document has a routing slip. When you are done reviewing this document, choose Next Routing Recipient from the Microsoft Office Word Send To menu on the File menu to return the document to its sender.”

9. Now you have some additional options available.

10. The ‘Return when done’ checkbox is very useful. When the all the reviewers finish changing the document, the document will add your name to the list of recipients. This way, the reviewed document comes back to you.

11. The ‘Track changes’ option is always on. This feature makes sure that the changes made by reviewers are visible to you. Further, you can decide whether to accept or reject changes made by reviewers. The changes show the deleted, changed as well as added text and formatting.

12. Another nice feature allows you to decide what actions reviewers can take with the document. If you choose none, they can edit anything. There are three more restrictive options.

13. You can only allow reviewers to add comments to the document. This is done by choosing Insert – comment option. This is a good option when you don’t want the base content to change but only want reviewers to share their views about content.

14. Alternatively, you can allow users to make changes and track them.

15. Finally, if you have a fill-in-the-blanks type of form (created using the Form Fields feature of Word) you can restrict users to using these fields only. Rest of the document can not be changed by them.

16. After all settings are completed, click the ‘Route’ button. Here I am assuming that we have chosen the one-by-one option. Now, check your Outbox. You will see a mail containing this document as an attachment which is addressed to the first participant only. The names of other recipients are not added to the CC list.

17. Where have the other names gone? No need to worry. These names and all the required routing information is kept within the document itself!

18. Now let us see what happens when the first reviewer receives the document. Of course the mail will contain the text shown above (and any custom message which you added). When they open the document, they can change it based upon the restrictions set by you.

19. Tracking is enabled by default. This will show the current and previous text in a different color and formatting style.

20. Now, how does the first reviewer know the name and order of next reviewer? That is smartly managed by Office. All that the reviewer has to do is to go to the same File – Send to menu. Because this document is already being routed, the Routing Recipient option is not seen at all. In fact the Send to menu has many different commands now.

21. The simplest method is to choose the Next Routing Recipient option. Word will find out the next person’s email id and create the required mail message.

22. Finally, when the last reviewer chooses Next Routing Recipient, you will receive the final version as a mail.

23. If required, any recipient can choose the Other Routing Recipient option to change the order of sending documents and even add more reviewers.

Summary

There is much more to document sharing, reviewing and tracking. However, even this single feature of Routing documents itself is so appealing and usable that it will change the way you handle documents everyday. Next time you are putting a long list of names in the CC, please wait and consider whether Routing is the feature you should be using!

About the Author:Dr Nitin Paranjape is the Chairman and MD of Maestros (Mediline). He is a consultant with many organisations, covering appropriate technology utilisation, business application of relevant technology, application architecture and audit as well as knowledge transfer. He has authored more than 650 articles on various technology-related subjects. He can be contacted at nitin@mediline.co.in