Narrative Appraisal Template

[Terrel L. Shields]

have looked at commercial narrative programs, but do not see the cost benefit at this time

I used one 10 years ago with a commercial trainee that wanted to use it. The reports were "OK", but had a lot of stuff to convert and delete that were unnecessary and the white space was absurd. It made my 40 - 50 page reports into 100 -120 or more pages, with graphs that took up pages and made edits difficult, and in the end you were stuck with a word document and all the pitiful editing functions (I never did get the real hang of adjusting pix in Word short dragging them where you wanted them by brute force.) Fonts were difficult to adjust, and simple pasting was confounded by dumb pop up windows offering you 10 choices to paste...WP OTOH, pops up and in the menu you can paste with or without the existing formatting.

 

[Thomas Holding]

Take a look at the DataPrompter (www.wordsite.com) document automation add-in for Word. It allows you to set up templates which will automatically fill in either individual elements or large chunks of boilerplate, but it gives you the option to choose from your responses by setting up dropdown lists, radio buttons, multiple selection checkboxes, etc. You can save a huge amount of time and reduce input errors using this if you take the time to carefully design templates for each report section. It is one of the most useful report writing tools I have ever used.

 

[Thomas Holding]

Oops repost

 

[residentialguy]

For a template, just use the 1004 wording and order for a template. People are used to the flow of a 1004.