Whether you are writing reports - or writing templates for the Clarinspect report generator - you need to know these top time, effort and storage saving tips. So read on to learn two more steps to making your reports more professional.

Preamble

The other end of the Assessment and Inspection process is the report you produce. This is what gets filed, delivered to clients, or becomes your inspection record. It needs to look good and be a reasonable file size so you aren't bloating your hard-drive or your client's inbox.

Honey, I shrunk the Word Doc!

A picture is worth a thousand words, so get as many into your reports as possible - so long as they help and are not just a collection of Internet cat-memes. 

The only down side to adding images is that the file size can bloat as the images are wrapped up in the document.

Let's look at an example - here is a document with an image. 

This is Musick Point, Auckland at sunset.

The image on its own was 1,175 KB, if I pop it into a word doc and save the document as-is the file size is 1,210 KB.

Look at the image size and the size of the document

Back in the document, click on the image, and into Picture tools.

In the 'Adjust' panel you have a button for 'Compress Pictures'

Click the 'Compress Pictures' button, and you get some options.

Make sure you have 'Delete cropped areas of pictures' and 'All pictures in document' ticked. Click on 'OK' - the images will be sized to suit your document for the way you have laid them out. 

Save the document. 

Let's look at the file size now.

The new document (Doc2.doc) is 10% of the original size.

That is an impressive saving. The document is still legible and printable exactly as it was before.

Update all references at once

Have you received documentation where the author hasn't checked the PDF of the document before they sent it?  The big clue?

In the middle of the table of contents is 'Error Bookmark not defined!' 

This is very easy to treat and is caused because the document has changed, but the author has not updated the table of Contents before PDFing (if there is such a verb).

You can update all fields, references and tables of contents in one hit.

1. Hold down the ctrl key, and tap 'A' (ctrl+A) - this selects everything in the document
2. Press F9

That's it. This fixes everything. You may get prompted about updating the entire table. 

Choose to do so and click on OK. 

There are no longer any excuses for 'Error Bookmark not defined!'

Wrap up

That's two major points for putting a shine easily onto your documents. With these you will never have a document reference that is incorrect, and your files will be a suitable size for storage and distribution. 

Never again will you be known as the person who sends bloated badly referenced documents! Score.

I have some tips about using Styles to better structure reports - but I will leave these until later as they are screaming out for a post on their own.