Advanced Settings & Message Center

To use this page please click on the gear icon in the upper right hand corner of the main screen.

This page is intended for 3 primary reasons: to make Advanced Settings changes, review backup options and to get certain informational messages from GOFR to troubleshoot any possible errors.

The settings are saved when you close the page.

The list at the top right of the page sets the language of the program, see Changing the language.

Advanced Settings tab

Enable Advanced Search Options: You can enable this to use regular expressions to narrow down the files by name. It adds the File Mask to step 2 of the main screen. This is an advanced option.
Ignore Temporary Office Files: This option is on by default and will ignore temporary office files that start with a ~.
Write unchanged files to output directory: This option controls if you would like to write the files to the output directory EVEN when no changes were performed on the document. For example, if your text substitution was not found, this option controls if you still want to write to the output directory. The default is in the "on" position.
Update template name (Word) & External Links (Excel) when hyperlinks are updated: This option needs to be turned on if you want to mass update the template name stored inside every Word, Excel and PPT document. Sometimes these file names point to a share and need to be updated. This option works in conjunction with the hyperlink option in the text screen. Both need to be turned on to update the name of the template document name stored inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

In addition this option needs to be turned on if you want to update outdated links to external Excel spreadsheets such as when the drive letter changes.
Merge from single list: This option in GOFR turns off the normal functioning of the program and puts it into a special mode. This option allows you to replace the same value that may appear in a single document multiple times with multiple values from another list using a find and replace operation. Let's say you have a simple list that has values like so:
```
Val1
Val2
Val3
…
Valn
```
And let's say you have a document that has place holders like so:
```
Title
Title
Title
Etc.
```
And you want to replace Title with values from the first list. Use this option to make this happen in your document.
Preserve binary format (2003 and older): During normal GOFR functioning, we will convert to XML format (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) to do all of the operations. If you have the compatibility pack installed and if you are not overwriting the original document we will keep the document in the new format. IF you want to preserve the original binary formatting of your document, please turn this option on. Note that WORD must be installed on the computer running GOFR for this to work, this is one of the few exceptions where WORD must be installed on your computer. When Word is not installed this option is not shown.
Include parent folder: This option is for those situations where you want to be able to output to a folder and keep the entire original directory tree of the input file.
1. This option overrides the "Keep Input Subfolders" on the main screen.
2. This option has no effect when you choose to overwrite the original files.
Do not use compatibility pack for macros & passwords: This option exists for 2 reasons. Compatibility pack allows us to convert old binary formats to the new .xlsx/.docx/.pptx without MS Office installation. There are 2 cases which can not be handled this way, and the MS office must be installed described below.
1. Compatibility pack will prompt the user for password, which may not be desirable. This switch when set to true disables the compatibility pack and forces the program to convert to new version using the appropriate Office Application (Excel, Word, and Power Point). This will open each program in the background to run the conversion and ignore those files that have the password protection on them.
2. For old 2003 and older binary Excel files which may contain macros. Compatibility pack unfortunately does not preserve macros in Excel. In this situation we will use MS Office to convert to new format for processing. For preserving macros Excel must be installed.
Please use this option with extreme caution. This will significantly slow down the process as opposed to using the compatibility pack.
Custom file types for text files: Here you can add your own file types such as .bat (as an example), comma separated. They are selected with the Custom check box in step 1 of the main screen. Note that the software will treat .bat and .BAT as not the same, if you want to use them both you will need to enter them here comma separated, with no spaces in between. So in our example here, you would enter .bat,.BAT.
Use Constants / Variables: This option enables the concept of variables in GOFR. See more documentation here: Variables
Images Selection Regular Expression: This option helps to streamline which images are pulled out of the documents to display in the Image Substitution screen. A regular expression is used for this. You can edit this expression to remove any images that are not needed to make the image loading go faster. Be careful to not put an incorrect regular expression – it will be ignored. There is a handy Reset button to get you back on track if you mess something up – so nothing is lost.
Apply Equivalent Characters: The intent for this option is to synchronize situations where a document may contain various single quotes, but you want to treat them all as one. There are several single quotes available in Word, this option says if you find a character in this list in text to find, use them all, basically similar to creating multiple find and replace substitutions with only one. This option is disabled by default, and must be enabled with the check box. The list of characters and its Reset button appear when the check box is on. For example, let's say that you are trying to find text: "Acme’s". Note that the text contains a single quote. But in your document you have this text: "Acme´s". Note that the single quote is different. You may enter all these quotes in the list provided and would only have to specify the value once in the text to find. The software will go thru the list of equivalent characters and replace them all. Use pipe | as a delimiter when entering.
Word Boundary Identifiers: These are the identifiers that are used to denote beginning and ending of words when the "Whole Word Must Match" selection is made. Different languages have different boundaries. For example a : is a word boundary in English but not in Finnish. So this option exists if you need to change the word boundary for your language. Note that carriage returns, tabs, line feeds are treated as word boundaries internally as well. The Reset button puts the original list back.
Preserve file creation/modified/access dates: This parameter helps you preserve your original file creation dates. After any document changes are made and saved, the original file creation date, modified date, access dates are reverted back to the way they were before any changes were made.
Remove Empty Paragraph (carriage return): There are some cases where after replacing a string of characters with a blank you ALSO want to remove the resulting empty paragraph. The reason for this is most often to remove an empty line of text that may result after removing some text.
Use old binary documents (2003 and older): This option is on by default. When it is turned off, the 2003 and older files (.doc, .xls, .ppt, .pps, .vsd) are left out when the program looks for files in step 2.
Process Efficiency Throttle: The number of documents processed at the same time is the number of processors in your computer multiplied by this value. The default is 1.5. Type a value and click Validate to apply it; Reset puts 1.5 back.
PDF Handling: This sets how find and replace is done in PDF files.
1. Native Word: the PDF is converted to a Word document by MS Word, the changes are made, and Word saves the result back to PDF.
2. Built-in (Exis): the changes are made directly in the PDF file.

Backup Options tab

Select Backup Directory: Click Set Backup Directory to select your own backup directory. Each time you run the program with the option to overwrite original files, your documents will be backed up here. The current directory is shown next to "Backup directory is set to:". The default root backup directory is set to:

C:\Users\<Your Name>\AppData\Local\Exis,LLC\Backups

You can put this directory anywhere you like. The program will create a subdirectory within the backup directory which will have a date and time stamp of the run. The directory name will look like this:

text-YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS-AM

Example: text-2016-11-22_11-31-29-AM

The subdirectories will be preserved.

There is a convenient button labeled Open Backup Folder which will open a file explorer at the location where backup is created.
Backup in the same directory as original: This is an additional backup option available to you. IF you are overwriting originals, and you enable this then in addition to the backup option in 1, the system will create a backup in the same directory as an original as many times as you update the file. This option is disabled by default.
Disable backups (when overwriting files): In some cases when there are a lot of files, you may want to disable the backups so as not to fill up your system unnecessarily with duplicate files. We certainly implore you to proceed with caution here: the program asks you to confirm. If something goes wrong, no backup will be performed. Please make absolutely sure that you have a good backup of your system when using this option. Selecting a backup directory with Set Backup Directory turns the backups back on.

Message Center tab

Shows you various messages. If there is a problem with the program, any error messages might appear here.

We are very very serious about making sure our program works for you. This page was developed specifically so that we can resolve quickly any issues that might arise.

For troubleshooting any issues, the Copy Messages To Clipboard button at the bottom of the page copies all the messages to the clipboard, in case we want you to send them to us.

About tab

Provides information about the current version of the program installed on your computer.