Case Studies

Barbara Waters is a consultant education psychologist who specialises in the assessment of student’s cognitive, educational and behavioural challenges.

Barbara writes a comprehensive and individualised report for each assessment. These reports contain a significant amount of data (over 400 data points), including the relevant results of the individual assessments and statistical rankings etc. Barbara was wasting a considerable amount of time manually entering data into Microsoft Word templates and knew there had to be a better way.

The solution I came up with is Report Writer, a custom FileMaker app that allows for quick and easy data entry of all of the information to generate a customised report for each assessment.

Report writer supports three different report types, with different combinations of assessments in each report type. Student/subject information such as name, gender, date of birth, and pronouns are used to individualise template text. A student’s age, in months and years, is also calculated as at the report date, to remove the need for manual calculation and additional data entry.

The results of the individual assessments, along with Barbara’s commentary, observations, and recommendations are entered into the relevant sections. The qualitative description is automatically calculated, based on the numerical results, reducing the need for manual evaluation and data entry, as well as improving accuracy.

An additional convenience feature, paragraph templates allow for commonly used paragraphs to be easily added into the report commentary where appropriate. Paragraphs can be ‘stacked’ to allow for a combination of applicable paragraphs to be added together. Paragraph templates can even include variables, special key-words that are automatically substituted for report data, such as a score, the student’s name or the correct pronoun (he, she, etc). This allows for natural language to be used in paragraph templates, without the need to manually edit the text each time they’re used.

Once all data is entered, the report is automatically compiled into a Microsoft Word document, based on a prepared template. This automatically generated document can then be manually edited and adjusted or added to as required. Once complete, the final report can be uploaded back into Report Writer for safe keeping.

Report Writer has had a profound impact on Barbara’s ability to produce professional reports. She tells me Report Writer has reduced the time required to compile a report by as much as half. The removal of tedious and fiddly data entry and repetitive writing has allowed her to focus more of her time on interpreting the assessment results and providing meaningful feedback and recommendations.

In Barbara’s words: “FileMaker (Report Writer) has made such a difference. I do not have to repeatedly type paragraphs that are standardised and yet it allows me to elaborate or change paragraphs if I need to. It has the ultimate flexibility! As a two finger typist, it has made the typing part so much quicker and more accurate.”

I really enjoyed working on the Report Writer project with Barbara. Barbara gave me a lot of creative licence, and limited details, leaving me to fill in the blanks and interpret what she needed and create a solution that works. With the power of FileMaker, I was able to easily make adjustments to the system if my assumptions turned out to be incorrect. As part of the development, I also re-made Barbara’s report templates from scratch, to ensure data was displayed appropriately and the formatting was consistent. Barbara was very happy with the resulting templates, as they were simply a more polished version of what she had put her time into creating.