The add-in

Check your sources without leaving the document

The button sits on the Home tab of the program you already write in. When it is finished, pressing it will fetch every source your report cites and compare it with the words you quoted from it — marked in the text, listed in the pane, and, when you seal, appended as a signed receipt at the end of the document. Today it reads the document, says what a check would send, and runs the check; marking the text and sealing from inside the document are the pieces still being proven in a real editor.

Early accessThe one-click listing in the program's own add-in store is submitted and under review. Until it clears, the button is installed by hand from a file you download here — two clicks in a browser, five minutes on a Windows machine, and a route around it on a Mac. Running a check from inside the document works today; marking the text and sealing from inside it are still being proven in a real editor, and the check also runs on the site, install or no install.

Download the add-in file Or see it work before you install anything

What the button does

Reads what the document cites — the body, the footnotes and the endnotes — and finds every source it names.
Fetches each source and compares it with the words quoted from it, marking the ones that resolve, the ones that drifted from the quote, and the ones that are not there at all.
Shows the same list in a pane beside the document, with the time each source was fetched, so nothing is a colour with no words beside it.
Appends a receipt to the end of the document when you seal: a numbered table of what was checked, a fingerprint per row, and a link anyone can open to check the record for themselves.

Green means one thing and never anything else: the source resolved and the quote was read back out of it. A source that resolved but whose quote nobody read is marked as exactly that, in words, and never green.

Which path is yours

Two questions, and the rest of this page becomes the one set of steps that applies to you.

On a Windows machine

One file you save where you can find it, and a setting you point at the folder it sits in. No administrator rights are needed, and it is the longest of the three paths — five minutes, once.

Press the button below. A small file called exhibit-b-word.xml is saved to your Downloads folder.
Move that file into a folder of its own — a new folder on your desktop called “Add-in” is perfect. It has to keep sitting somewhere the program can read; do not delete it after installing.
Right-click that folder, choose Properties, then Sharing, then Share, and share it with yourself. Copy the network path it shows you — it starts with two backslashes.
In the program, open File, Options, Trust Center, Trust Center Settings, Trusted Add-in Catalogs. Paste the path, press Add catalog, tick Show in Menu, and press OK twice.
Close the program completely and open it again. On the Home tab, open the add-ins list, go to the Shared Folder tab, choose EXHIBIT B and press Add.

A group called EXHIBIT B appears at the right-hand end of the Home tab, with one button in it: Check sources.

The shared folder is how this program has always accepted a hand-installed add-in; it never leaves your machine and nothing is published on your network. When the store listing clears, this whole page becomes one link.

Download the add-in file

On a Mac

Open your documents in a browser instead, and install there. It is two clicks, and the check is identical.

Sign in to your documents in a browser tab and open the report you want checked.
On the Home tab, open the add-ins list and choose Upload My Add-in.
Press the button below to download exhibit-b-word.xml, then choose that file in the upload box.

The Check sources button appears on the Home tab of that browser tab, and the pane opens beside your document.

There is a way to install into the program on a Mac by moving a file into a hidden system folder. We do not print it: it is a terminal in a dress, and a product that asks an expert witness to do that has failed its own test. Use the browser, or use the check further down this page, until the store listing clears.

Download the add-in file

In a browser

Two clicks, nothing installed on the machine, and it works the same on a Mac, on Windows and on a borrowed laptop.

Open the report in a browser tab.
On the Home tab, open the add-ins list and choose Upload My Add-in.
Press the button below to download exhibit-b-word.xml, then choose that file in the upload box.

The Check sources button appears on the Home tab, and the pane opens on the right of the document.

Download the add-in file

When there is no “Upload My Add-in”

An administrator has switched it off for the whole organisation. Two things work, and both start today.

Use the check on this page. Drop the report below and it runs here, in this tab, with nothing installed. It is the same engine, the same receipt and the same signature as the button produces.
Send this page to whoever manages your organisation's accounts. What they need is one paragraph long and it is written out below, ready to forward.

Either you have your check in the next few minutes, or your organisation has the button for everybody — and usually both.

This is the commonest silent dead end on the whole install path: the menu item is missing, nothing explains why, and a buyer concludes the product is broken. It is not. Somebody in your organisation turned off hand-installed add-ins, which is a reasonable thing for them to have done.

The paragraph to forward to whoever manages your accounts

EXHIBIT B is a task-pane add-in for the document editor. It is deployed centrally from the administration console: Settings, then Integrated apps, then Upload custom apps, then the manifest file linked from this page, then assign it to a group. It requests read and write access to the open document. It sends the document's text to the address in the manifest for the check and stores nothing of it; what it writes back into a document is a receipt table the author asks for. Its privacy statement and its terms are linked at the foot of this page.

The file

exhibit-b-word.xml

A small text file. It carries no code: it tells the program the button's name and the address the pane is served from. Keep it where you can find it again — on a Windows machine the program reads it from that folder every time it starts.

It asks for

permission to read and write the open document, which is what a receipt appended to the end of it requires
nothing else: no account, no sign-in, no key to copy, no access to your other files

Download the add-in file

What leaves the document

The text of the document is sent for the check, once, and nothing else: not the file, not its formatting, not its headers or footers, not existing comments, not tracked-change history, not the deleted text nobody has accepted yet, not a revision author, not an embedded image, not the file name and not one piece of the document's metadata. Before the first send, the pane says how many characters and how many paragraphs and footnotes are about to go. Nothing is written into the file until you seal, and nothing the button leaves behind carries a verdict on any sentence you wrote.

This is the more private of the two ways in: uploading the file sends the file, and the check reads it here. The button sends the text and never the file.

The whole of it, in the privacy page's own words

The two ways in do not read the same amount of a document

The button reads the body, the footnotes and the endnotes. An uploaded file is parsed by a different reader, which sees the body only. A footnote-heavy report checked as a file will therefore show fewer citations than the same report checked from inside the document — neither count is wrong, they are counts of different text, and every receipt records which reader produced the text it describes.

The exact assembly, published so a stranger can rebuild it

What the button will not do

It does not judge whether your conclusions are right, and it never will. It records which sources were checked, against what, and when.
It writes nothing into the file until you seal — and what it writes then is the receipt table and two plain facts, its identifier and its date. No sentence of yours is ever labelled inside the file.
Marks in the text are drawn by the program's own reviewing layer where the program is new enough to have it, and they are not saved into the file. Close the document and they are gone, which is correct: a result from Tuesday must not sit in a document on Friday looking current.
On an older installation the marks live in the pane only, unless you switch on the one option that colours the text — and that option says, in the sentence next to it, that colouring the text changes the file and prints.

Or see it work before you install anything

Drop the report here and the check runs in this tab. Same engine, same marks, same receipt. If the pane in your document is going to be worth having, this is what it will tell you.

Drop a DOCX or PDF here, or paste textDOCX or PDF, up to 15 MB — or paste the text of a report

A check started here is sealed here. The button in the document seals from inside the document instead — that is the only difference between the two.

Before you install

Does it need an account?: No. No sign-in, no key to copy, no password. The one thing it ever remembers about anybody is the address a sealed receipt was sent to, and you type that once, at the moment you seal.
Does it work offline?: The pane opens and tells you what the document already carries — which receipt, sealed when — with no network at all. Checking a source needs the network, because checking a source means fetching it. When we cannot be reached the pane says so plainly, and never repaints an older result as though it were current.
What happens with Track Changes on?: The check runs and nothing is written into the document. A structural insertion under review would sprout a revision mark at every citation and land in a filing under your name, so the button refuses to make one. Everything lives in the pane until you seal, and the receipt then goes in as one insertion you can see and accept.
Can I check part of a document?: Yes. Select the passage and use Check selection only; then that selection is all that is sent.
Will it slow the program down?: The pane is a panel beside your document, not a change to the program. Close it and nothing of it is running.