What's New in Lucanet Disclosure Management?

Disclosure Management now includes the Layout Check, an automated check for typography and formatting issues in Word chapters. Layout Check runs automatically when a chapter is checked out or updated, or when a result document is created, and lists violations found in the new Layout tab of the Messages task pane.

Layout Check includes the following functions:

Disclosure Management now supports Content groups, letting you tag sections of a Word chapter for different audiences and generate audience-specific result documents from a single document instead of maintaining separate versions.

Content groups include the following functions:

Disclosure Management now supports reimporting result documents. Finance teams can bring externally edited Word documents—for example, after an auditor review or an external translation—back into the existing report structure without having to manually update each changed section.

To simplify the external translation of a report, the Creation workspace now also includes the option Generate as translation document. A document generated this way contains the content in the default language but uses the target-language variants of the out-areas for tables and charts. An external translation team can edit the content directly in the Word document; afterward, the document can be brought back into the target language via reimport from the history.

Reimport is available to all users with the Edit all result documents permission at the Basic license level and requires no additional configuration.

In the Insert body text number dialog, three more number formats using the en dash ("long minus") are now available, this time with three decimal places. As with the existing formats, the preview in the drop-down takes the document's localisation into account and shows, for example, 1,234.567 | –1,234.567 for an English document.

In the Insert body text number dialog, the % unit is now also available for single values. Previously, this unit could only be selected in Percentage Variation mode (a two-period comparison). When you select % as the unit, Disclosure Management automatically multiplies the stored raw value by 100 and appends the percentage symbol. For example, a value stored as 0.42 in Excel appears in the running text as 42 %. The percentage symbol is taken from the document settings and can be configured there. The number format (decimal places, separators) remains freely selectable as usual.

In the document settings, you can now define the date format for document variables (such as sn_duedate). You can choose between a format without a leading zero (for example, 30.6.) and a format with a leading zero (for example, 30.06.). This ensures that IF formulas in tables that compare date values match the displayed format. Existing documents are not affected—the default setting preserves the current behavior.

A new toggle Uniform table row heights is now available in the document settings (formatting section). When enabled, the row heights of inserted Excel tables are normalized so that rows size to their content instead of inheriting the heights from Excel. This gives tables a consistent appearance throughout the report without the need to adjust each table individually. The toggle is disabled by default, so existing documents are not affected. The feature is available for Office for the Web and Office Native.

The Highlight changed values on refresh option in the MS Word document settings is now coupled to the Update values within table insert mode. With the other insert modes, the option is greyed out. If you disable the option, existing table highlights are removed on the next refresh.

Disclosure Management now includes the Style Guide. The Style Guide gives you a central tool for binding the design of your reports to your corporate design in a consistent way. With the Style Guide, you store your company's formatting rules as an XML file centrally in Disclosure Management. As a result, all authors work with the same specifications for fonts, headings, body text, and other text elements. This prevents visual inconsistencies between chapters or contributors from the outset and reduces the effort required for the final layout alignment.

The Style Guide has the following characteristics:

Disclosure Management now has a typography correction feature that automatically applies non-breaking spaces, narrow non-breaking spaces, and space suppression in Word chapters, and enables global administrators and document administrators to manage the underlying rules per language. The new Spacing tab under Configure document provides a central overview of the defined typography rules. In the typography rules, you define how certain expressions in your document are to be separated from one another or kept together. Separate rules can be defined for all languages used:

The feature has the following characteristics:

MS Office Native is now available as a mode for MS Office in which you can use the ribbons for Office for the Web together with the locally installed Office programs (MS Word and MS Excel). MS Office Native is the mode in which Disclosure Management runs directly as an add-in in the locally installed MS Word or MS Excel desktop application (as opposed to Office for the Web, which runs in the browser). You enable the use of MS Office Native by selecting MS Office Native under Configure document in the MS Office variant area.

For more information about the differences between the variants, see the MS Office Variants: Web, Desktop, and Native chapter.

The Office ribbon for MS Word has been reworked. To keep the ribbon clear and to group related functions, the ribbon now has two new tabs: The DM-Content tab contains all content-related functions, and the DM-Layout tab contains all layout functions. For MS Office Native, two separate manifest files (for layout and content) are therefore now available in the Toolbox.

An Excel ribbon is now also available for MS Office for the Web. Previously, MS Office for the Web was only available for MS Word—in MS Excel, only the ribbon for MS Office for Desktop could be used. With the new Excel ribbon, you can now also edit MS Excel documents directly with MS Office for the Web in the browser.

On the Layout tab of the Disclosure Management ribbon in Word, a new Special characters button is available. The button opens a drop-down menu with five options: Em Dash, Non-Breaking Hyphen, Soft Hyphen, Non-Breaking Space, and Soft Line Break. Each entry shows the name of the character, an icon, and a tooltip describing its purpose. Selecting an option inserts the character at the cursor position as a regular Unicode character that is retained during check-in and check-out, versioning, and copying and pasting. The characters are visible when the formatting marks (¶) are enabled in Word. The feature is available to users with write access and is included in the Basic license.

With this feature, you get typographically correct business documents without taking the detour via Unicode codes or keyboard shortcuts. The characters are retained as regular Unicode characters—even during check-in/check-out, versioning, and copy-paste. All authors of a business or sustainability report access the same selection, which reduces typographical inconsistencies between chapters by different authors.

The Remove data change highlights function is now available in the ribbon of the Office Online add-in. It allows you to reset manual formatting at the paragraph and character level easily and quickly, so that the original styles are restored.

The DM-Layout tab of the Word ribbon gains additional functions for fine-tuning the layout:

For more information, see Ribbons for MS Office Native and Ribbons for MS Office for the Web.

In the Insert body text number dialog of the Word add-in, six additional number formats for text values are now available to you. The new formats use the en dash ("long minus") for negative values—either directly in front of the number or with a thin space as a gap. You can choose between three variants with a different number of decimal places (none, one, two).

The preview in the drop-down takes the document's culture into account: In a German document, for example, 1.234,56 | −1.234,56 appears, and in an English document, 1,234.56 | −1,234.56. Inserted text values are formatted according to the selected format string.

When configuring a mapping in Import Management, two additional transformation types are now available. Multiply multiplies each numeric value of a source column by a defined factor and writes the result to a new column—for example, to convert values reported in thousands into single units or to flip the sign of a column. Substring extracts a defined portion of a text value—starting at a given position for a defined number of characters—and writes it to a new column, for example to derive clean programming values. For more information, see Defining a Data Source.

When creating a Word result document, the new Remove content controls option is now available in the Word functions section of the Create Result Document dialog. When enabled, all content controls are removed from the generated result document, while the content within them (text, values, and so on) remains intact—only the control wrapper is removed. The option is disabled by default, so existing result documents are unaffected unless you opt in.

This gives you a clean result document that is free of structural Word helper elements, which can be disruptive for external recipients or downstream processing steps. The option applies to Word result documents only and does not affect the source documents of the report instance. For more information, see Creating Result Documents.

When defining a table template, you can now use the new Cell margins button in the Layout configuration area to set consistent cell margins (top, bottom, left, right) and, optionally, spacing between cells. As a result, all tables inserted from the template have a consistent, professional cell layout, without you having to format each table individually. This feature is currently limited to the Office for Desktop variant.