Authoring the Main Agreement and Contract Addenda

With enhanced contract authoring, you can use any OpenXML editor to quickly create an assembled document such as a Main Agreement or a Contract Addendum document. Creating an assembled document is as simple as setting up styles for the document which allow you to structure the content into sections and clauses.

You can define any text style element supported by MS Word for each indentation level in the contract document. This is a useful feature for fonts and spacing. It is especially useful for clause and section numbering.

Applying styles is specific to each contract document, such as the Main Agreement or Contract Addendum. This enables different contract authors to use the same clause text in their documents, but employ different formatting. For example, the look of one Main Agreement could be different than another Main Agreement due to different fonts, indentations, and numbering. However, both Main Agreements could contain the same clause content.

Style mapping enables you to enforce a uniform corporate look and feel for all contract documents. If the styles are updated and saved in an assembled document in a Contract Workspace template, all future contract documents will get the new look. The document you wish to use for mapping should be cleansed (all existing formatting removed) before applying any styles to the paragraphs.

Any of the pre-existing, default styles in Microsoft Word can be used in creating the document.

You can link styles in Microsoft Word to section titles and content in a Main Agreement or Contract Addendum document.

You do this in one of two ways:

1. Define a label for the title and content for each section and link it to a pre-existing style, such as Heading 1, in Microsoft Word or another OpenXML editor.
2. Define a label for the title and content for each section and create your own style within Microsoft Word or another OpenXML editor.

If you want the application to combine more than one paragraph into a clause (by default, each paragraph is treated as a separate clause), then you must create a new paragraph-level style and add the word combine  to the start of the style name. In this way, the paragraph is appended to the immediately previous clause or section, and multiple paragraphs can be combined into a single clause. You can apply the Ignore style to any content in your document that you want the application to exclude from the Outline View in SAP Ariba Contracts. Images are excluded by default from the Outline View.

Any paragraph containing text that does not use a heading style (for example, a Microsoft Word style such as Heading 1 or Heading 2) automatically becomes a clause, also known as the Microsoft Word style: Normal.

Essentially, you choose your labels based on the section levels, which you can see in the document's Navigation Pane in your editor or the document's Outline View after it is uploaded to your contract workspace. For example, a contract document with two section levels within the global section can have the following labels:

• Title Level 1 (titles of first-level sections)
• Content Level 1 (content within first-level sections)
• Title Level 2 (titles of all second-level sections)
• Content Level 2 (content within second-level sections)

Play the video to learn how to format the main agreement using Microsoft Word styles.

• Enhanced Contract Authoring: Use OpenXML editors to create structured documents with sections and clauses.
• Text Styles and Formatting: Define text styles for different indentation levels to customize fonts and spacing.
• Style Mapping: Enforce a uniform look and feel for all documents through style updates in Contract Workspace templates.
• Combining Paragraphs: Create new styles to combine multiple paragraphs into a single clause.
• Outline View: Apply the Ignore style to exclude content from the Outline View in SAP Ariba Contracts.