The Exhibit helper tool simplifies working with what are typically referred to as exhibit marks in Word documents. In this context, an exhibit mark is the uniquely numbered or lettered reference to a specific exhibit. For example, if an affidavit refers to three attached documents (exhibits) then it might refer to or “mark” them as Exhibit A, Exhibit B and Exhibit C. Or it might mark them as JW-1, JW-2 and JW-3 where JW is the initials of the person that the exhibits are related to. No matter how they are marked, the underlying concept is that the exhibits are numbered (1, 2, 3) or lettered (A, B, C) consecutively in the order they are first encountered in the body of the document. It is both inefficient and error prone to be manually typing these exhibit marks because you will need to manually renumber them, including any repeat references to them, whenever you delete or move the exhibit marks within the body of the document or if you add new exhibit marks high-up in the document.
The Exhibits helper allows:
- creation of multiple sets of uniquely numbered exhibit marks within a document. Most documents only need a single set of exhibits marks – they would typically be based on the initials of the person they relate to
- selection of either numbered or lettered exhibit marks
- ability to start the numbering from something other than “1” or “A”
- easy insertion of cross-references to exhibits. The above image shows that the photo of the accident scene was defined in the paragraph numbered 3.a and has been cross-referenced in another paragraph – double clicking on the chain-link line would jump to the location of that repeat reference to the photo
- easy changing of the prefix (initials). All existing usages will automatically update, including cross-references
- recording of extra details for each exhibit. For example, your document might need to show the date of each exhibit. Or you might need to show how many pages are in each exhibit, or show a range of page numbers from a larger document containing multiple entries
- creation of a Table of Exhibits in a format that you can define, including using the custom data values (dates, page numbers, etc) assigned to each exhibit.