ClauseBuddy lets you insert placeholders to mark text that should be completed or customised later.
In their simplest form, placeholders appear as text with a yellow background in Microsoft Word. But placeholders can do much more than that.
Filling and configuring placeholders
Instead of inserting a clause directly into Word, you can choose Configure clause from the dropdown menu.
This opens a configuration panel where all placeholders in the clause are grouped together:
At the bottom of the window if space is limited
On the right-hand side if there is enough horizontal space
Click a placeholder to enter a value. The placeholder is immediately replaced by the text you provide.
To remove an assigned value, click the trash icon.
Using placeholders multiple times
If the same placeholder is used more than once in a clause, it is replaced everywhere with the same value.
This makes placeholders a powerful alternative to manual “find and replace.” You only need to fill in the value once, and all instances update automatically.
For example, suppose you have the following clause:
When you tconfigure this clause, you will notice that only three placeholders are shown in the placeholders-panel:
When you fill in any of those placeholders, you will notice that all of the instances of that placeholder will be immediately replaced by the text you typed in. For example:
Using predefined options
If you frequently assign the same values to a placeholder, you can define predefined options directly in the placeholder.
To do this, separate options using a pipe (|). For example:
Mr.|Mrs.
ClauseBuddy then displays these options in a dropdown menu. You can select one of the predefined values or enter custom text.
You can also define two-level options by adding sub-options in square brackets. This allows you to group related values into structured menus, making selection faster and more consistent.
... will then be presented with submenus, as follows:
Remembering placeholder values
ClauseBuddy remembers the values you assign to placeholders:
Across multiple clauses using the same placeholder
Across sessions, by storing values in the document’s metadata
This metadata is encrypted and only visible to users within the same customer account. External recipients cannot see it, even if they use the same placeholders.
Important:
Some document-cleaning or “metadata-scrubbing” tools remove DOCX metadata before documents are shared externally. If this happens, ClauseBuddy will no longer remember previously assigned placeholder values when the document is reopened.
Want more automation?
If you need more advanced automation, consider using:
Smart Templates in ClauseBuddy for document-level automation
Clause9 for highly dynamic, multilingual clauses with conditional logic
These advanced clauses can be stored in your library and used directly in ClauseBuddy, ready to be customised and inserted into Word.