Help · Designs

Designs

A design is the layout a document is made from. It saves as you work, it remembers its earlier versions, and the same design can make next month's documents from next month's data.

Starting a design

From Designs, start from one of 12 finished documents — invoice, quote, receipt, pro forma invoice, credit note, delivery note, purchase order, statement, monthly report, client report, market commentary and certificate — or from an empty page. A starter comes with sample figures, so it looks complete straight away; point it at your own data and it fills itself in from that instead.

• With data already in your workspace: choose it in Use this data before picking a starter, or from the design itself.
• With a spreadsheet you have not brought in yet: Bring in a spreadsheet from the design. See Importing data.
• With no spreadsheet at all: a starter can have its details typed in, with Type the details in.
• Not sure what your spreadsheet should look like: Download a sample spreadsheet gives you the starter's own example figures as a CSV, laid out the way BroadPaper reads one. Replace the rows with yours and bring it back in.
• From an empty page: your own layout, with your own columns as its fields. Drag a list onto the page and it becomes a table.

How many saved designs you can have depends on your plan; see Plans.

Using the designer

A design opens full screen: the page in the middle, a panel of things to add on the left, and the settings for whatever is selected on the right. It saves as you work — the bar at the top says Saved — and Ctrl+Z (⌘+Z on a Mac), or the undo arrow, takes back a change.

• Blocks are what a page is made of — headings, text, images and your logo, fields, statistics, tables, key / value lists, charts, signatures, dates and page numbers. Click one to add it, or drag it to where it should go. The search box finds one by name.
• Layout adds columns side by side, a new section, or a page break, and has Edit header and Edit footer. The header and footer repeat on every page, and are where a starter prints your letterhead.
• Data lists what your data holds. Drag a field onto the page to show it, or into a text block to put it in a sentence; drag a list and it becomes a table.
• Layers lists everything on the page in order — header, body and footer — so a block that is hard to click on the page can be selected, moved up or down, or deleted from here.

The page, and text styles

Click beside the page, or press Esc, so that nothing is selected, and the right-hand panel shows the document itself:

• Page — size, portrait or landscape, margins in millimetres, and a background colour;
• Header & footer — their heights, and a different header or footer on the first page;
• Text styles — the size, weight, colour and spacing of headings and body text, where changing a style changes every block that uses it;
• Tables & cards — table lines and fills, and the spacing between blocks.

Fonts are the ones BroadPaper embeds in every document, so what you see on screen and in the finished PDF always agree. Your business's name, address and logo are not set in the designer: they come from Your brand, and when you keep more than one set, the bar at the top chooses which this design uses — see Your letterhead.

Design and Preview

The switch at the top of the page moves between Design, with outlines and handles for editing, and Preview, which shows the document with your data exactly as it will print. Pages break in Preview where they break in the PDF, so check a long table there before making the document. For a design split into several documents, the arrows in the bar at the top step through them one at a time.

Importing a Word document or a PDF

If your business already has an invoice, a quote or a report laid out in Word or saved as a PDF, you can start a design from it. From Designs, choose Import a Word document or a PDF and pick the file.

The file is read in your own browser and is never uploaded. BroadPaper works out the headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, images, page size, margins, header and footer, and shows you a preview of the design it made — with a list of what it found and anything it could not carry across — before anything is saved. Nothing counts against your plan until you press Make it a design.

An import is a starting point, not a copy. It gives you the structure and the words of your document as an ordinary design, which you then adjust in the designer like any other. Expect ordinary business documents to come across well, and documents built from floating boxes and shapes to need more work.

Your table becomes data you can refill

When the document has a table that looks like rows of data — a heading row with several rows underneath, like an invoice's lines — BroadPaper turns that table into a set of data in your workspace, with each column's type decided the same way as when you bring in a spreadsheet, and the table in the design is filled from it. Point the design at next month's data and the table fills in from that instead. Rows underneath the table that look like totals — a subtotal, VAT, the amount due — are set below it as a list of labels and figures. A total whose figure is exactly the sum of one of the table's columns is kept up to date from the data, so next month's invoice adds itself up; any other figure, such as a VAT line, stays as the document printed it, so check it before you send a document made from new data. Other tables in the document stay as they were written, and you can edit them.

The fonts in the document are replaced with the nearest of the fonts BroadPaper embeds in every document — a serif with Source Serif 4, anything else with Inter — so that what you see on screen and in the finished PDF always agree.

What comes across from Word

• Comes across well: headings and body text from Word's styles, bold, italic, underline and colour, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, pictures, the page size and margins, and the header and footer — including a different first-page header, and page numbers, which stay live.
• Comes across roughly: text boxes, shapes and anything positioned freely on the page. Their text is placed in reading order where it can be found, and the screen before you make the design says when a document had any.
• Does not come across: SmartArt, charts, comments and embedded objects. The screen names each one it found. Equations come across as plain text.
• Tracked changes are imported as if every change had been accepted, and the screen says so. If a change should be rejected, reject it in Word first.

Only .docx files are read. An older .doc file needs saving again from Word as a Word Document (.docx) first, and a password-protected document needs its password removing on a copy.

What comes across from a PDF

A PDF does not record which text is a heading or where a table is — only where each word sits on the page — so BroadPaper works the structure out from the layout: lines into paragraphs, larger text into headings, text lined up in columns into tables, and what repeats at the top and bottom of every page into the header and footer. Images are carried across as pictures.

• Tagged PDFs do best. A PDF exported from Word or another program with accessibility tags switched on says what each part is, and BroadPaper uses that when it is there.
• A scanned document cannot be read. A scan is a picture of a page with no text in it; the screen says so rather than making an empty design.
• A password-protected PDF cannot be read. Save a copy without the password first.
• A long PDF is read up to a limit of pages, and the screen says where it stopped. A design is usually the first page or two of a document anyway.

If you have the same document as both a Word file and a PDF, import the Word file: it carries far more of the structure.

Who can import, and how many

Importing is part of Pro, which includes 30 imports a month. An import is counted when you press Make it a design, not when you read or preview a file, so looking at what a document would give you is free on every plan. The count resets on the first of the month, and deleting a design made from an import does not give the import back. Each import also makes a saved design, and a set of data when its table becomes data, so it counts towards those limits too.

Your letterhead

Your business's name, address, email, phone, website and registration line — company number, VAT number, regulator — are kept once, under Your brand, and every design prints them. Change them there and every design picks them up.

• A logo can be a PNG, a JPEG, a WebP or an SVG, under 400 KB.
• A look can be set for every document on the brand, or left alone so each design keeps the look it was designed with.
• One colour can replace the look's main colour.
• More than one set of details — two trading names, or an agency invoicing under a client's letterhead — can be kept side by side, and each design chooses which it uses from the bar at the top of the designer.

What fills each field

A starter design is filled in from your data through a set of matches — this field from that column. Press Fields in the designer to see every one, with a real value from your data beside it, and change any of them. The full explanation, including typed-in values and the design warning you when it has stopped trusting a saved choice, is in Matching fields to a design.

Working figures out

A figure on a document does not have to be a column in your data: a total can be added up, and VAT or a discount applied to it, without writing a formula. Select a block that shows one value — a Field, a Statistic or a Progress / gauge — and press its Value box in the right-hand panel. It has two tabs: A field, to show one of your columns as it is, and Worked out.

A worked-out value is a starting value and then steps, each one applied to everything before it:

• Start with a field, a number, or a total of a column across every row of a list — Total of, Average of, How many, Highest or Lowest.
• Add a step, and choose what it does: add, subtract, multiply by, divide by, add, as a percentage or subtract, as a percentage.
• Shown as chooses how the result is printed, such as money or a percentage.

There are no brackets to get right, because the steps are worked through in order, and underneath them the whole thing is written out as a sentence to check it by — the total of the line amounts, then the VAT rate added as a percentage. Only figures are offered, apart from How many, which can count the rows of any list. The document keeps its previous value until every step has something chosen in it.

Adding VAT, a discount or a retention

Add, as a percentage is the step for VAT: it adds that percentage of everything so far, so a subtotal of 1,000 with a VAT rate of 20% becomes 1,200. Subtract, as a percentage takes a discount off in the same way. Choose the field holding the rate — a percentage column, or a rate typed in on the Fields screen — and if the rate is blank nothing is added, rather than the total going blank. If you choose a number rather than a field, write it as a fraction: 0.2 for 20%.

A value you cannot change

Some figures in a starter design or an imported one are worked out in a way the steps cannot show — one that depends on a condition, for example. Rather than risk changing what the document prints, the designer shows it locked and named after the fields it reads; point at it and it says it is worked out for you from them. Change those fields and the figure changes with them.

Thumbnails

Each saved design gets a picture of its first page, drawn from the real document with its own data and letterhead, so a list of designs can be recognised at a glance. It updates shortly after you change the design — usually within a minute, and later while BroadPaper is busy producing documents — and until a picture is ready a plain placeholder shows in its place. A thumbnail is only ever a preview: it plays no part in the documents you make.

History

A design saves as you work, and BroadPaper keeps earlier versions of it. Press History in the designer to see them.

A burst of editing is kept as one version rather than one per change. A new version starts when you come back after about fifteen minutes away from the design, or after two hours of continuous editing. Each version says what changed in plain words — added, removed, changed or moved — such as Added a table to “Summary” or Changed the page margins.

You can preview any version, and compare it either with the version before it or with the design as it is now.

How much history is kept

Every version is kept until a design has more than 100 of them. After that:

• everything from the last 30 days;
• older than that, the last version of each day;
• older than a year, the last version of each week;
• the first version, and every restore, always.

Days and weeks are counted in UTC, so near midnight a version can belong to the day before or after the one on your clock.

Going back to a version

Open History, choose the version, and press Make this the current design.

Restoring never throws anything away. It creates a new version, identical to the one you chose, so the design as it was a moment ago is still in history — and if the restore was a mistake, you can restore that version in exactly the same way. The design keeps its current name.

Restoring a design does not change documents you have already made from it. A document is a finished file; to have one that matches the restored design, make it again.