Updated Document Templates And New Editor - February 2022

This month we've launched a big update for our health and safety documents, that includes:

• Updates to every template
• New design
• New editor

This update has been many months in the making, so we are excited to finally get it into your hands!

Updated templates

You might have noticed some changes to our health and safety templates. That's because we've updated all 555+ of them! And not just our usual updates either, we've totally redesigned every template. The content, the layout and the design.

Why the changes? We asked ourselves this a few times as we painstakingly edited 555+ templates, element by element. But as technology and browsers get more powerful, there were some new features we wanted to use that would make editing easier for you.

For example, we've kept our templates fully editable but added a few features like risk selectors and checklists. It makes it easier for you to create your documents (and looks better too!).

You can view all of our new templates by clicking Documents > Templates from your account dashboard.

New design

The new design is nothing too major, don't worry. Your health and safety documents will still look like, well, health and safety documents. But the new templates have been freshened up. A little extra spacing here, a little tidy up there, a layout tweak or two.

The new design should help make your documents look more clean and polished. Less 2018, more 2022!

New editor 🆕

Ok, ok, we are (really!) excited about the new editor. It's faster, smoother, and easier to use. It's got more of the features you need, and less of the ones you don't so editing is quicker, and simpler too.

The pop-up menus that used to appear on certain elements and get in the way have gone. Now, when you are writing or editing, you can focus. If you need access to the toolbar, it can always be found at the top of the screen in edit mode.

We've also added a few new edit features:

Checklists

Now, our templates are not just a tick in a box. But if you want a tick in a box, you can have one (or hundreds) with our new checklist and checkbox menu items.

Table of Contents

Are you creating a health and safety policy or report? In our old templates, you would only get a table of contents if we had added one to the template. And you could only see it in the PDF download.

You can now add (and remove) a new and improved table of contents. Click on any item in your table of contents, and it will link to the section you click. Both in the browser and the PDF download.

Better Tables

You can highlight multiple cells, and the new tables handle commands like, add row before, add a column after, split cell and merge much better. They also look (and edit) better on different screen sizes like desktops, mobiles, and tablets.

What else?

Most of the changes are behind the scenes, and while you can't necessarily see them, they will make your document creation experience better.

🐛    When you copy and paste content from other places, the new editor will strip out all the embedded styles and hidden elements that could sometimes create bugs in your documents.

💾    Your documents will now autosave every minute, so you can worry less about saving and more about creating.

🆕    We're using a new PDF generator for the new templates, that's fully compatible with all the new features. So your documents will look great on screen, and downloaded.

Don't worry about any edits you saved from our old templates, these will still open up in the old editor, and you can continue to make changes and download. But we recommend updating to the latest template version when you need to create a document for a new project, rather than re-using an old edit.

What's next?

We'll be busy for the next few weeks updating all of the product page images with screenshots of the new templates, and creating a more detailed guide with all the features of the new editor.

The Documents Plan has been getting a lot of attention with this update. But don't think we've forgotten about the Training Plan. We've got a big update coming that we've already started working on. We don't have a launch date yet - but keep an eye out for news later this year!

In the meantime, we will keep adding more content and features to the HASpod service. Create your account to get monthly updates straight to your inbox.

Stay safe,

Team HASpod