Exporting documents to Word
You can export the following from Lawmaker as Word documents:
UK, NI and SP Bills,
SIs, SSIs, NISRs and WSIs, and
Northern Ireland amendment lists (Notices of Amendments, Notices of Withdrawals, Marshalled Lists and traditional Lists of Draft Amendments).
This feature can be useful:
To share editable content of the bill or amendment(s) with someone without access to Lawmaker.
To export the content of a document with comments displayed in comment bubbles rather than inline (which is how Lawmaker’s PDF renderer displays them).
(Northern Ireland users only) To export the Speaker’s Brief to Word to make the most of Word’s formatting and presentation features.
How to export a document from Lawmaker
Navigate to the project you want to export the document from.
To export a Bill or SI:
Find the document version on the Project tab.
Select Document Actions > Export to Word.
To export an amendment list:
Find the list from either the Amendment Workspace tab or the Official Lists tab.
Select Document Actions > Export to Word.
The generated Word document will appear in your download folder from where you can open it or save it elsewhere.
Provisions exported from Lawmaker that aren’t currently handled properly by the export feature will be highlighted in yellow to draw you attention and allow you to adjust the style and presentation as required.
Example of content highlighted in yellow in a Word export from Lawmaker
Known limitations of export feature
When a paragraph (e.g. paragraph (a)) is inserted as the first provision in a quoted structure, it is assumed for indent purposes that it is a child of a subsection.
Where a provision contains more than one text paragraph within it (e.g. inserted by pressing
Shift+Enter), the indent of second and subsequent paragraphs isn’t always correct and will need checking and updating in the Word document if necessary.Numbering of schedule paragraphs in SI documents include 2 full-stops after them.
Table formatting is mostly handled but some subtle deviations might be noticed which can be tweaked in the Word document if necessary e.g. font size and row spacing.
The option to display headers of tables on all pages doesn’t carry over to the exported Word document
Structured content in tables might not have the correct indent - this is something that will be addressed in future releases and in the meantime can be tweaked in the Word document if necessary.
Images aren’t currently handled and need to be manually re-inserted into the Word document after export.
MS Word documents are quite brittle. A single misplaced element in the underlying XML prevents the document from opening at all. If you experience issues when opening an exported Word document:
Report it to the Lawmaker support team who will investigate the issue and see if its something worth fixing for future iterations; and
Have a quick scan through your document and check if there are any novel or unusual structures that might have tripped ‘Export to Word’. If you spot anything suspicious
Duplicate your document version,
Remove the questionable structure,
Export to Word again,
Assuming export was successful, manually add the missing content.
Whilst exporting a document into Word can be used, at last resort, to enable the document to be worked on offline, we recommend against using this approach as a matter of course because the conversion to Word and back to Lawmaker will not preserve all formatting and metadata, and it may introduce errors. For example, special formatting, cross references, Jrefs, table formatting, comments and tracked changes may all get lost or changed in the process.
It is also currently not possible to import amendments from a Word document into Lawmaker. If you were exporting a list of amendments for review purposes, any feedback would have to be manually applied to the amendment list in Lawmaker.