Dataprompter

  • Thread starter Thread starter Andrew
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A

Andrew

I'm an allergist in New York and am hoping to use Dataprompter for some
of my office notes and forms. I was very excited to read about what
Dataprompter could do in Microsoft's MVP pages - but now that I've
downloaded it I'm lost without documentation or a user guide. I had
considered myself a fairly experienced computer user - for a doctor is
my 50's - but I've had no prior experience using templates, or even
macros, in Word.

Does any documentation exist besides the Help Topics printed from
within Word??

I'll email Bill directly with this question on Monday, but if anyone
else could help me, I'd be very grateful.


Andrew Sustiel
 
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/EM010720821033.aspx?CategoryID=CE063645771033
Is this what you're talking about?

(BTW, I kind of doubt that Bill will personally read or respond. There are
contacts within Microsoft that deal specifically with issues related to the
use of Microsoft products in the medical field. I had the name of a contact
but I'm fairly certain it's in an email at work, if I kept it. I work in the
medical field and was getting a POC for one of our doctors.)
 
I believe there should be installation instructions with the download;
beyond that, you have the Help. I've always found DataPrompter pretty
intuitive to use.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
Hi Andrew,

Fellow Word MVP Suzanne Barnhill was kind enough to alert me to your post.

I'm sorry you're experiencing difficulties. I will be happy to try to help
you sort things out, either by phone or by email. Please feel free to
contact me with questions. If you get my voice mail, be sure to
specify a good time for me to return your call, and I will try to call
you at that time. I will happy to pursue this with you this weekend,
if you're interested.

Most users find all they need in the brief tutorial files and in the help
message. The Frequently Asked Questions are particularly worthwhile, and the
entire help file fits on three or four pages when printed out, so I strongly
urge you to print it out and read through it.

In the meantime, let me suggest some ways to think about DataPrompter:

There are two main categories of functionality:

1) prompting for data.

2) assembling documents.

There are several types of datafields that prompt for different types of
data. Certainly one of the first things to do, if you haven't yet done so,
is to create an example of each type of datafield. To do this, choose
Create/Modify DataField, then (this is an important step) select the
TYPE of datafield you want to create: short text, long text,
dropdown list, multiselect, address, or checkbox, and then click Create.

Assembling documents can be done manually, by inserting one boilerplate
item at a time, or automatically, by assembling an entire list of
boilerplate items.

Before you can insert or assemble, you must create some boilerplate items.
To do this, create a new Word document, add some text to it, then choose
File>>Save As Boilerplate Item. For example, you could create a
document that describes a certain illness, and save the description as a
boilerplate item. Then create a document that describes a different type
of illness, and save that description as a boilerplate item. From then on,
whenever you need to include such a description in a document, simply
choose Insert Boilerplate Item and then select the item you want to
insert. Or, to assemble several items, choose Assemble Boilerplate Items
and then click Add Item and repeat this until you've created a list of all
the items you want to assemble, then click Assemble.

I hope this gets you started.

Bill Coan
(e-mail address removed)
 
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