Word Add-In Awesomeness

One of our core values at Patent Bots is that we want our tools to be easy and even enjoyable to use. Your time is valuable, and we don't want to waste it. We spend an enormous amount of time thinking about our user interface and how to make it better to save you time.

Our Word add-in is an important part of making our patent proofreading easier to use, and we are excited to announce two cool improvements to our Word add-in. Our Word add-in now shows proofreading results within Word instead of opening a separate browser window. With this update, our proofreading results are able to interact directly with your Word document.

To get access to the new features described below, you need to have the latest version of our Word add-in. If you don't have it, you can force an update by uninstalling and reinstalling the add-in.  See our documentation for details.

AutoNav

The first new feature is called AutoNav. On demand, we automatically scroll your Word document to show you the part of the patent application you are reviewing in the proofreading results.

In the example above, the user is reviewing our proofreading results for claim 2. When you click the blue arrow, we automatically scroll the Word document to show you claim 2. This makes it very easy to jump to portions of the Word document and saves you time in reviewing proofreading results.

We include AutoNav arrows every time we show you text of the patent application in our proofreading results. Not only for claims, but also when we show you paragraphs of the specification for word support and reference labels. With a quick click, you are looking at the exact part of your application that you need.

Ref Label Navigation

We've added another navigation feature to our Ref Label Tracker. For each ref label, we've added four buttons:

• — Go to first instance
• — Go to previous instance
• — Go to next instance
• — Go to last instance

Using these buttons, you can easily cycle through each instance of a ref label in your patent application.

We'll be adding more Word add-in awesomeness throughout the year. Please let us know if there is anything in particular you would like to see!

Art Unit Predictor and USPTO Changes

We have had several people ask us how our Art Unit Predictor will be affected by changes to how the USTPO assigns patent applications to examiners and art units.

We have previously disclosed details of the accuracy of our Art Unit Predictor, and we expect that changes to USPTO procedures will make our Art Unit Predictor even more accurate in the long term.

Here is a summary of in progress changes to the USPTO's procedures for assigning patent applications to examiners:

• Changing to the classification system (USPC, CPC, etc.)
• Assigning applications directly to examiners instead of to art units and then to examiners.
• Using computers instead of humans.

Let me know if I neglected to include something important above.

Data Don't Lie

At a high level, we don't care about changes behind the scenes at the USPTO. For the most part, we don't even need to know how they are doing it. We have the data, and that is all we need.