The Quality Link Blog

If you are in the process of creating documents for your quality management system, whether it's for your laboratory, ISO compliance program, or any other type of quality system, you may have a need to utilize both a standard/portrait page layout as well as a landscape page layout.

If you are just using a regular document (without any templates) then this is as straightforward as you would expect. You just need to change the layout in your word processing program. However, if you are using Quality Link templates, then it is a good idea to have a solid understanding of how Quality Link manages documents.

When you edit a document, which has a template applied, Quality Link first loads the template (including all headers, footers, and page layout settings as defined in the template) and then Quality Link loads the contents of the document. What this means is that the page layout settings actually come from the template (since it is loaded first). Therefore, if you modify just the page layout for the document, these changes will not persist, and the document will revert to the page layout established by the template the next time you open the document.

In order to maintain different page layouts (i.e. portrait and landscape) for documents which use templates you will need to create a template that utilizes the required page layout. Consequently, you may have two templates that have the same headers, footers, and quality item fields, but each with a different page layout.

For more details on how to create custom templates you can refer to the section, "Creating and Managing Document Templates" in our "Managing Documents - Quality Link Tutorial". This tutorial is available for download here.

Quality Link Development Team