MedLook Weekly Tip For 09/19/2005

The Custom Reports provides for a very powerful and flexible user-definable report format. Rather than passing along some complicated report writer, or developing some new system, MedLook allows you to use tools you are already familiar with to develop and create your own reports. Key to this is a Rich Text Format (RTF) editor such as Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, or even WordPad. Using an RTF editor you can define the content, layout, field lengths, color, font, font size, and more of every item in the report.

There are four basic flavors of reports: patients, appointments, insurance, and referrals. Each of these comes already prepared with a perfectly good working example. In addition each of these reports have several fields and commands in common such as Template, Output Folder, Single File option, Edit, Browse, Explore, Process and a grid to select an item or items from as appropriate.

Template defines the full path and name of the template file. For patients this defaults to the MedLook installation folder plus "Template\PatientTemplate.rtf". You can, and should, edit these files as needed and save them somewhere other than in the installation folder (e.g. c:\MedLookTemplates).

The Output Folder defines the path where the generated report(s) will reside.

If Single File is checked then the reports for each item will be placed into a single file rather than into an individual file for each item. Your output will vary according to your template. One thing to note though is that the longer the report gets the slower it is to generate a single report.

Edit is used to invoke the editor defined for your system for the file type (.rtf) defined by the template.

Browse (...) opens either a File Open or Folder Open browser to select either a file or a folder.

Explore opens Windows Explorer (My Computer) in the Output Folder location. You can use this to then select and print or review your reports.

Process is the command you select to generate the reports.

Next time we'll look at how to actually create a custom report of your own.

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