Skip to main content

​
What is the Departures Table?

The Departures Table is a specialized report that helps you see how a document has changed—with full context. Instead of just showing edits inline or as redlines, it highlights the entire section or clause where a change occurred. This makes it easier to understand changes at a glance, especially in long or complex documents.

​
What Is It Used For?

The Departures Table is typically used during collaborative editing or negotiation processes. It’s especially helpful when:
  • You want to quickly review all meaningful changes without digging through redlines.
  • You’re working with large documents and need a summary that highlights changes in full paragraphs or sections.
  • You need a clean, shareable summary of updates to send to others for review or approval.

​
How to export a Departures Table

1
Run a Redline in Draftable comparison
2
In the Draftable viewer, navigate to any of the export options in the top-left, and select Departures Table. A Departures Table can be generated for Open, Save, Save to DMS, Copy to Clipboard or Email.

​
How to configure a custom Departures Table template

Available from version 26.10.0 Use a Word document with a table header and a final data row. Put tokens in the data row to choose which information appears and in what order. Draftable repeats that row for each departure.

​
Available tokens

The page number refers to the Draftable viewer/redline, which can differ from the number printed in the source document. Tokens are case-insensitive, so {Page} and {page} work the same way. Blank cells without data tokens remain empty. Draftable preserves static text in cells without data tokens, so leave them blank if you want to fill them in after export. In the header row, you can use tokens for Draftable’s default column titles or type your own titles.

​
Example layout

Create this two-row table in Word. The first row is the header; the second row contains the data tokens: For a more compact reference, put {Reference} (p.{Page}) in one data cell. You can add, remove or reorder token columns to suit your review.
Custom Departures Table template in Word with Page, Clause, Proposed departure, Review notes and Commercial impact headings, and a data row of tokens with the Commercial impact cell left empty

​
Start from Draftable’s template

1

Copy the default template

Open the Resources folder in your Draftable installation and copy DeparturesTableTemplate.docx to a working folder. For a standard per-user installation, the file is at:
2

Edit the copy in Word

Open the copy in Word. Keep a header row and a final data row, then use the tokens above to choose the columns. You can change fonts, table formatting, header titles, and the document’s header and footer.
3

Save as a DOCX file

Save the finished document as DeparturesTableTemplate.docx.

​
Existing templates without data tokens

Templates whose data row contains no recognized data tokens continue to use the previous fixed layout. Keep at least four columns in this order:
  1. Departure ID
  2. Section reference
  3. Changed clause
  4. Review notes/comments
You can change the headings and formatting and add empty columns to the right. These templates do not gain a Page column automatically. To change the column order or add page numbers, put the appropriate tokens in the data row. Header tokens alone do not enable the new layout. At least one of the five data tokens must appear in the final data row; {CommercialImpact} is only a header token.

​
Deploying a custom Departures Table template

1

Copy the template into your Office templates folder

Copy DeparturesTableTemplate.docx to:
Draftable looks for this exact filename. Keep the .docx extension.
2

Verify the output

Generate a new Departures Table and check that its columns, page references and formatting match your template.
The custom Word template is used for both single and Combined Departures Table DOCX exports. An HTML email-body export uses a separate DeparturesTableTemplate.html file in the same folder; editing the Word template does not change the HTML output.

​
Having issues?

Reach out to the support team at support@draftable.com and we will assist you in getting your departures table template working, or if you have any questions regarding this feature.