First, think of a report view as a book. In this book contains chapters, and within each chapter are topics. For example: a report, (think "book") might be titled "Home Inspection Report", with one chapter in the book being "Structural Systems", and within that chapter would be related topics such as Foundations, Roofing, Walls, etc. in which you would enter your findings.
The report samples we provide, and ones you might create, all follow this concept. The main program is structured to present a report to you in this manner, with a panel on the left side similar to what you might see in an Adobe Acrobat document, where it has an hierarchal tree structure for navigating the book, complete with chapters and its related topics as branches off the related chapter (see the image below). You can open and close various chapters to view or hide the topics that you will comment on when filling out a report. When you click on a topic, it opens an editor window in the center panel where you add your comments. This editor window could start out empty, or could be pre-filled with one of our templates or even a template of your own design. In addition, the template could be set up as a field entry style form, whereby the cursor can only be positioned on specific fields like text entry or checkboxes, or can simply be a free style word processor document.
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This image shows a typical navigation panel in WhisperReporter. Notice that the top level icon is a book and indicates the name of the report view. Chapters currently use a folder icon to indicate it is a container, and topics use a document icon to indicate it is a page that contains editable information. Topic icons can change. For example, if nothing has been entered into a topic, its icon is an empty document. However, if something has been entered, the icon shows a nonempty document. Therefore, a simple glance at the navigation tree will indicate which topics have been commented on, and which have not. Additionally, if a topic has been marked as complete, it will have a small checkmark added. |