TOPIC: Report Writing, Help Please

Report writing is an art form. It takes time to learn. From the dozens of sample reports and hundreds of narratives I've looked at I've determined that it a rare art as well. :  Long rambling sentences, grammatical errors, and just poor syntax make reading them a chore. : It also puts people off.  Write to your audience. The average literacy rates are not that high and people get lost in long wordy documents.  Comments should be short and to the point. Forget about the rules about paragraphs you learned in school. Break up long comments into logical parts for easier reading.

When I first started working with HIP, I was coming from 6 years of 3-D and writing my own narratives and re-writing many that others had written.  The first "default report" I tried to use was a nightmare. Every page and section had a crap load of inappropriate, useless, unneeded and just badly written comments. Wow! Where did you guys go to school?
It was almost unusable.  At that point I decided to start fresh and began building my own templates with my own comment library.
The addition of the drop down list function really sped things up.  Now, the note function is really helpful. Makes searching for comments much easier.

I think that if you have pages and pages of comments such that you need to scroll the page up and down or side to side, you've messed it up and are over thinking it.  Using the drop-down list feature should eliminate abut 80% duplicate type comments if you craft them right. Instead of writing "The xxxx had this problem. and then The xxxxx had that problem, use the drop down list feature to cut that down to one sentence that can be made to cover 80% of the problems you are like to find for that item.

I think overly long reports are an attempt to CYA for all possible circumstances or done by someone that is just not sure what is really important and what is not so they write down everything.  

By the way, I'm coming from having done over 4000 inspections over 9 years.  This ain't my first Rodeo  My clients and Realtors love my reports because they "cut to the chase" and are not filled with BS stuff that is not important. ;D

I use narrative often as the majority of my clients are highly educated .
Canned language on today's report would be impossible to store with EIFS and stone at the exterior with a 100 year old foundation combined with a 2010 addition on a 3,200 sq foot home that was originally 800 sq feet combined with lot grade issues and lack of proper flashing or weeps in a barrier system.
my typing skills came into play big time as EIFS is very rare in Chicago.

I could have been like a checklist guy and simply put recommend foundation contractor,etc but that is not how I operate.
Consider myself better than average and must have an above average report.

The punch list shortens for Agents and Brokers it but the details for the smart and want to know are there.
Been getting Construction Lawyers,Agents,Engineers,Lawyers,etc a lot lately.
I even list what I miss if anything and why.

Thank you Dominic,  There are a few things here that I'm not using.  I plan to start trying them.

Thanks again for making this program the best it can be!

Hello,

Is the slide show option for hip software or the web site??
If you can use it on hip how do you turn it on? 

I never tried batch loading.  What do you do with all the pics you don't want?

Thank you

Re: Batch Loading......
Much faster way to get pics into the report. You can just delete the ones you don't want or need as you annotate them.
The program will take care of the sorting based on the assignments you make. There is a check box option to leave the first space empty if you want to add a specific pic as the cover page shot.

Having said that, I work over my pics from the 60-80 shots I take during the inspection and adjust the shot and make annotations in an outside program and save the "edits" in a separate folder.  This is the folder that gets imported in a batch.  My first shot in that folder is always the full frontal view for my cover page so I un-check the box.

I've dialed in this process so it only takes about 10 minutes to prepare all the pics. I prefer the third party annotation abilities of
Snagit Editor ( www.techsmith.com/snagit.html ) It is a bit more flexible than the built-in annotation capabilities in HIP in that it allows me to caption the picture right ON the picture which saves time in not needing to do it in HIP.  I can also add multiple captions with arrows for each etc if needed.

Dana,

I’m familiar with adding photos but always entered them one at a time.  What happens if you don’t delete them?  I noticed if you don’t indicate where to put them they don’t show up in the report. 

I agree with your comment above.  I am not a great writer/speller but was surprised to see spelling errors and the lack of order when I first received the report.  The basement/crawlspace plumbing section (damage panels) were also wrong.  This was my only complaint.  I didn’t realize I would have months of work to do.   

Don’t get me wrong I love what Dominick has done to give the user so many options.  The price is right.  I like the fact that Dominick is open to suggestion and is always working to make the program better. You can’t beat the customer service either.

Thank you for your help.