If you’ve ever had to delete the NetDocuments document stamp out of a footer by hand before sending a filing to the court, you’re not alone. It is one of the most common requests I get about stamping, and it comes up in almost every implementation.
The stamp itself is a good thing. It puts the Document ID in the footer so anyone holding a printed page can find the file again in seconds. If you want the full explanation of how stamping works between NetDocuments and Word, I covered it here: How Document Stamping Works with NetDocuments and Microsoft Word.
The NetDocuments Document Stamp Is an ndOffice Setting on Each Computer
Here’s the part that surprises people. The stamp isn’t controlled centrally. It’s an ndOffice setting that lives on each computer, and the user can change it themselves.
When we roll NetDocuments out to a firm, we set the stamp option via a registry key so all machines start out identical. That’s a starting point, not a lock — after go-live, anyone can go into ndOffice and change their own stamp setting.
Either way, it’s a setting that applies to every document that user saves. It’s on or it’s off. That works 95% of the time. The other 5% is where the calls come from:
- You need a clean copy – The document is going to the court or to opposing counsel, and the internal Document ID has no business being on it.
- The font doesn’t fit – One document needs a smaller stamp so the footer doesn’t collide with the letterhead or run onto a second page.
- One-page documents get nothing – Firms with printed letterhead often stamp the footer only after the first page. A one-page letter then gets no stamp at all.
- The version number is noise – You want the document number on the page, but not the version.
Toggling the ndOffice setting off and back on for a single filing is a bad idea—someone always forgets to turn it back on. So we wrote a Word macro that handles all four cases on the document you have open, without touching the user’s ndOffice setting at all.
Part 1: What IT Needs to Do (5 Minutes)
The macro lives in Word’s STARTUP folder, so it loads every time Word opens. Do this once per machine.
Step 1: Download the Macro
https://optiable.com/ndOffice-macros
Step 2:Open the Word STARTUP Folder
Open Windows Explorer and paste this into the address bar:
%appdata%\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP
If that path doesn’t exist, go to %appdata%\Microsoft\Word\ and create a folder called STARTUP.
Step 3: Copy the Macro into the STARTUP Folder
The file has to sit in that folder, not in Downloads. Word only loads what’s in STARTUP.
Step 4: Right-Click the Macro and Go to Properties
Step 5: Check the Box Next to Unblock and Click OK
Windows blocks macro files downloaded from the internet. Skip this step and Word will load the file and refuse to run it.
Step 6: Launch Word and Click Enable Content
Step 7: Turn On the Quick Access Toolbar
The buttons appear on the Quick Access Toolbar, so it needs to be visible. Right-click over the save button to toggle it on.
Rolling this out to the whole firm? Push the file to the STARTUP folder with a login script or your management tool, and the buttons show up the next time each user opens Word. This is also a good time to check the ndOffice stamp setting across your machines — if it was set by a registry key at rollout, users may have changed it since then.
Part 2: What Your Users Will See
Change Font: This allows you to change the stamp font and size for that document.
Remove the Stamp: Removes the stamp from a document. You can then save the document to NetDocuments without the stamp. You might have documents you need to upload to the court or send to opposing counsel, but you don’t want the stamp in place.
Add Stamp: Because of the firm letterhead, you might have set your NetDocuments to stamp the footer after the first page. The stamp won’t appear on a document with only one page. The add Stamp feature will add the stamp to one-page documents.
Remove Version: Will remove the version while keeping the document number.