Exporting documents

Work does not stay inside Alchex. An auditor asks for a copy, a supplier needs the procedure as an attachment, someone wants the change history in a spreadsheet. There are two exports, and they answer different questions.

Downloading a document

Open the document and choose Download from the ⋯ menu. What you get depends on what kind of document it is — the menu tells you before you click:

Anyone who can open the document can download it. The file is named after the document, and non-Latin characters in the title survive on any current browser.

It downloads the draft, not the published version

This surprises people, so it is worth stating flatly: the Word export gives you what the editor is showing right now, including edits that have not been published yet. If you need the version readers actually see, publish first, or open the published version from Version history and export from there.

The generated document control section

Every Word export starts with a Document control section that Alchex builds for you, ahead of the body. It is assembled from the real record rather than typed by hand, and carries the document's identity — name, reference code, type, owner, status — followed by its version history and the approvals behind those versions.

That is the part an assessor usually asks for and the part a hand-maintained table usually gets wrong. If your document body still contains a hand-typed version-history table from an earlier life, the two can sit side by side for a while; the generated one is the one that stays current on its own.

If the generated section cannot be built for some reason, the export still succeeds — you get the document without it, rather than an error.

What is deliberately left out

The exported file carries no author or machine metadata. The Word fields that normally record who created a file, who last saved it and which account was involved are blanked, so no internal identifier travels out with a document you send to a customer or an auditor.

There is no PDF export of an authored document. Export to Word and print or convert from there.

Exports are recorded. Exported the document appears in the document's activity log alongside edits, approvals and publishes.

Exporting the activity log

Open the Activity panel on a document and choose Export CSV.

This gives you the document's complete history, not the page you can see on screen. The on-screen feed stops at the most recent entries for readability; the export does not stop at all.

Each row carries:

• timestamp — when it happened
• event_type — the kind of event
• actor_id and actor_name — who did it
• version — the version in force at the time, where one applies
• summary — the human-readable line, the same wording you see in the panel

Anyone who can see the activity feed can export it; there is no extra role requirement beyond access to the document itself.

One safety detail you will notice if you look closely: values that would otherwise start with =, +, - or @ are prefixed with an apostrophe. Spreadsheets treat those characters as the start of a formula, and a document title or comment should never execute when someone opens the file. The apostrophe is what stops that.

Choosing between them

• Someone needs to read the document → download the Word copy or the original file.
• Someone needs to prove how the document got here → export the activity CSV, and point at the document control section of the Word copy for the version and approval record.

Related

• Version history — pick a specific version before exporting.
• Activity and archive — reading the log on screen.
• Publishing — making the draft you just exported the official one.