General Information panel
This small panel in the upper left corner of the window is used to navigate through various dialogs that allow you to enter information such as the client and property details, as well as other information which might appear on a cover page or invoice, and which is not directly related to observations gathered during the inspection itself. Information entered in these dialogs do not necessarily print in the report unless the report view references the information using tags. Tags are place-holders that are typically used to pull in data from other parts of the report and are discussed later on in this document.
Navigation panel
This panel, along the left side of the window, is used to navigate to specific topics in the report where you would enter information that will be printed in the report under the specific topic. For example, if you have a topic called "Roof Covering", clicking on that particular topic would bring up the comment area specific to Roof Covering without having to scroll around looking for the correct area in the report that deals with roof covering. Report and Work views both consist of chapters and topics; a chapter can contain multiple topics; for example, you might have a chapter called "Structural Systems", and several topics that relate to that, such as topics for foundations, roofing, doors and windows, etc. Information is entered into topics only, but are grouped for easy navigation according to their respective chapters in the Report and Work Views. Note that a Work View is optional, and might be used to better navigate the Report View if the Report View differs dramatically from the way you perform an actual inspection. For example, the Texas standard report form is by system, not room-by-room; therefore, the Report View navigation tree would correspond to the Texas 7A-0 report layout, and the Work View could correspond to a room-by-room navigation. It would be good to note at this point that each topic in a Work View actually points back to the actual topic in the Report View. In other words, the topic "Windows" under the Work View's chapters for Master Bedroom, Kitchen and Living Room, will each bring up the same "Windows" topic the appears under the Report View's chapter for Structural Systems. This allows you to have the flexibility to see and change how your findings for a particular Work View topic should be integrated into the report itself instead of guessing how WhisperReporter might assemble each topic into the final report.
Comment panel
This is the area where you enter your comments, observations or any other bits of information related to the topic you selected in the Report and Work navigation panel. This area might start out blank, or if you used a template when creating a new report, might be pre-filled with data that you have set up ahead of time. This panel contains a fully integrated word processor, including live spell checking with auto-correct, a thesaurus and image support. The program is designed in such a way that you don't need to concern yourself with the details of how to use a word processor, but is available to improve the presentation of your findings as you become more familiar with our word processor. Quite simply, you can click on a topic and start typing in your observations without any knowledge of how to use a word processor, and yet still produce a very nice report because the report generation and formatting is generally defined by the report view. And since any formatting you do in a topic stays in that topic, you cannot mess up the report layout just by entering your observations, unlike some other reporting solutions on the market. Details on using the integrated word processor is discussed later in this document. You can also edit your comment with or without visible margins by right clicking on the comment panel, and selecting Page View (visible margins) or Text View (no visible margins).
RapidRemarks/Images panel
This panel, on the right side of the window, displays all relevant RapidRemarks that pertain to the topic you are working on, and a secondary tab which displays all the images you have inserted or made available for use in this particular report. At anytime, you can simply click and drag images and fully customizable RapidRemarks into your comment area, or use the F2 key to perform a quick lookup and insert from the current list of RapidRemarks (see RapidRemarks for more information).
Hint panel
The Hint panel is an area at the bottom of the window which can be used to display anything you want as helpful 'hints" while you work on a specific topic. Some possibilities might be to include portions of the Standards of Practice, inspection handbook entries, calibration figures or even little reminders to yourself to watch out for certain conditions, which can be very useful for new inspectors.