Overview of Export to Word

Scope

As of v20, ‘Export to Word’ only works for NI Bills, Acts and amendment lists (Notices of Amendments, Notices of Withdrawals, Marshalled Lists and traditional LoDAs (Lists of Draft Amendments)).

Intended uses

This feature can have different uses e.g.

To share editable content of the bill or amendment(s) with someone without access to Lawmaker.
To export the content of a bill so that it can be worked on offline e.g. a train journey with intermittent internet connectivity.
To export the content of a bill with comments displayed in comment bubbles rather than inline (which is how Lawmaker’s PDF renderer displays them).
To export the Speaker’s Brief to Word to make the most of Word’s formatting and presentation features.

Whilst exporting bills into Word can be useful for certain scenarios e.g. offline working, it shouldn’t be used as a de facto drafting tool instead of Lawmaker as the ‘Import from Word’ operation is limited e.g. formatting, cross reference, Jrefs, table formatting, comments and tracked changes would all need reapplying to the Lawmaker version after import.

As of v20, it is not possible to import amendments 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.

Known limitations

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.
The indent of unnumbered paragraphs or second sentences isn’t quite right. These can be manually fiddled in the Word document if necessary.
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 on all pages doesn’t carry over to the exported Word document
Fixed quoted structures

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 would need manually inserting into the Word document if required