Nine things to check before you send any document

Most embarrassing document mistakes are not hard to find. They are just easy to miss when you have been looking at the same pages for a week. Here are nine things worth checking before you send anything, whether or not you use a flipbook.

The checklist

1. Placeholder text. Look for "TBD", "TODO", "XXX", "lorem ipsum" and anything left in square brackets like [insert name]. These are the classics.
2. Dates that have passed. An offer that "ends March 31" when it is October, or a policy marked "effective January" that is two years old.
3. Prices that disagree. The same item at one price on page 2 and another on page 9. Often one was updated and the other was not.
4. Links that no longer work. A link to a page that moved, or a site that closed. Click every one.
5. Repeated pages. A page pasted twice by accident.
6. A title that is a file name. "Final_v3_REAL.docx" shows up in the browser tab and in link previews.
7. Pages with almost no text. Fine for a photo page, but a scanned page cannot be searched or read aloud.
8. Reading level. Is it written for the people reading it? Most business writing is easiest to follow at around grade 8 to 10.
9. The phone test. Open it on your own phone. If you have to pinch to read it, so will your readers.

Run the first eight automatically

FlipbookIQ's Check tool does the first eight for you. Open a flipbook in the Studio, choose Check in the left rail, and press Run the check. It looks through the text of every page and looks up the web links, and gives you a list.

Each finding is labelled Fix, Check or Note, names the page, and shows the words that triggered it, so you can judge it yourself. Click a finding and the Studio jumps to that page.

It is deliberately plain. It uses rules you can read, not guesses:

• A date after "valid through" or "expires" that has passed is a Fix.
• A date after "last updated" that is more than a year old is a Check.
• The same label with different amounts on different pages is a Check. You may have two plans on purpose, so it asks rather than tells.
• A link that returns "not found" is a Fix. A site that refuses a program is only a Note, because plenty of working sites do.

What it cannot do

It cannot tell you whether the content is right. It can tell you that page 4 says $49 and page 9 says $59. It cannot tell you which one is correct. And it never changes anything: it only points.

Make it a habit

Run it before you share, and again after you republish. It takes seconds and it catches the mistakes that make a document look careless. The Check tool is on every plan, including free.

Try it on a document you were about to send.