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General Software Discussion / Re: Form letters for medical use
« on: March 08, 2023, 05:04 PM »
This is a different direction, but I've heard that a lot of organizations are finding ChatGPT to be very helpful for customizing/personalizing form letters.
I have yet to experiment. :)

But in this case, there are a set of quite prescriptive guidelines relating to how things must be laid out on the page, how to present the information as simply as possible, how to make it work for people with learning disabilities and other conditions that can make potentially complex issues difficult to engage with. There are quite a few possible outcomes of a retinopathy scan, some of which consist of "don't worry and come back again next year" and others where a referral to a hospital ophthalmology service is needed. I'm told the number of different possible letters that might need to be sent are close to 100...

TFLM is excellent for defining chunks of boilerplate text that can be added in just by choosing options from a menu. But this is a step beyond that: instead of text (or pure text, anyway) think small, friendly picture on the left with large font text using just a few of Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer style words to give a simple and understandable message. And those blocks must be spaced carefully on a page, so the white space is as important as the words.

I'm wondering if I can maybe suggest the use of something like a Publisher template with mailmerge fields and use the latter to call up a graphic / textbox pair, prebuilt and preformatted to be dropped into a precise position on a page / group of pages. If I can make TFLM spit out csv style data, that might work...

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Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: GS-Base Mini-Review
« on: March 08, 2023, 12:24 PM »
Just waking up an old thread: I'm still using this, the product is still being developed. I bought a second licence so a colleague and I can use a database I built for the storage of user details, and she (by no means any sort of techie!) finds it works well for her as well as me.

My favourite thing right now is its ability to make custom drop-down lists for fields and either to specify a finite set of possible entries (like a field that can be True or False) or one that can be told to take anything it hasn't seen before and add it to the list of acceptable entries. Multiple selections are possible, you can set the order manually or have the list sorted alphabetically, and checkboxes are a brand new addition.

The Form view of the data is I think getting easier to work with. It's still really fast, and although I still miss being able to do the things I used to love Approach for, this is still a database with the best bang for the buck out there.

I intended to post a screenshot of a form view of a data item and discovered that my colleague has been playing with some of the design elements. Specifically fonts. Oh dear. Still, I guess it illustrates something:

testuser.png

There are four dropdown lists: three for predictable / static choices, one (job title) for a good way of accumulating things that might be reusable in the future and will save typing.

There are a few calculated fields -- UserID is either surname+first initial all in lower case (as illustrated) plus any content in the UIDSuffix field so you can deal with the 50th John Smith who rocks up... but if Login Name has content, it'll be that instead.

NewPass is a calculated field chosen by gluing together a randomly chosen attribute (usually colour) and a randomly chosen animal, from a separate table in the database. The calculation that handles that is very Excel-ish

=concatenate((vLookup_ex("PasswordConstructor",(int(randBetween(0,22))+1),"Row","PassA",0)),(vLookup_ex("PasswordConstructor",(int(randBetween(0,22))+1),"Row","PassB",0)))

and as the random number generator does what they generally do, it calculates a new password (a) any time anything happens, and (b) any time you press F9, so we pick one we like, ^C and ^V into the IssuedPwd field so it can be recorded.

What we do with this is use it to spit out a CSV of any records where Done = False and feed a mailmerge with it, after which Done is set to True.

Would that be useful to you? Probably not. If  DIY databases were popular, there'd be more of them and people would use spreadsheets for adding up. But if it's the sort of thing you need, you might not find a more cost-effective solution anywhere.


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General Software Discussion / Form letters for medical use
« on: March 08, 2023, 05:20 AM »
This might be a bit rambly. Bear with me. :)

I was chatting to a couple of admins for the local diabetic retinopathy screening service yesterday. They already routinely send results letters to patients, but they're trying to do something specifically for people with reading and learning disabilities.

So they got hung up on designing a layout for a letter; there are some agreed standards for font, layout, illustrations, borders, object positioning and sizing and so forth, and the main part of our conversation was around helping them understand what the difference between a master page and a page with actual, variable content is.

So far so straightforward.

However, letters are built depending on the findings of a patient exam and the content will vary considerably depending on all sorts of factors. And somewhere in the back of my mind, some background process was wondering if something like Mouser's Form Letter Machine could help.

I've come to the conclusion that probably not. But the concept: a set of checkboxes and radio buttons that can place prebuilt elements on a page, perhaps with some variable information (like patient name and address, perhaps) and where those elements are very formatted (a graphic with some associated text) and intended to fit within a strict layout (say four horizontal panels with a set amount of white space between the elements) strikes me as exactly the sort of thing that ought to exist already...

I know how to make mailmerge-type documents work, but the concept of embedding a specific object following strict layout rules based on a user-selectable choice in a dialog of some sort, I don't think that's something I've seen. It doesn't feel like it ought to be all that niche but maybe I'm just more inclined to think about automation than most people?

Anyone have any ideas of things I might suggest or helpful things I might try? Or even (I guess) if I could use The Form Letter Machine to output something that something with page design features could be persuaded to pick up and work with?

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General Software Discussion / Re: Listary 6 released
« on: December 29, 2022, 06:58 AM »
I've only just updated to Listary 6 and -- for my use of it -- it seems similar to Listary 5. But I only really use it for fast access to specific folders, a folder history in load and save dialogs, and for occasional file searches.

Keywords are right there -- features tab, commands -- and there's an add function. I have a Pro licence, though, carried through from my Pro version of 5, so maybe more of the functionality is locked away from users of the free version?

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LaunchBar Commander / Re: Disappeared LBC?
« on: December 27, 2022, 06:36 AM »
LBC does automatically keep some backups, so the first thing might be to find these backups, in the directory where your launchbar is, and preserve them.

Hi, and thanks for such a quick comeback during the festive season!

I've got LBC back again, after a fashion, and I think I've found what's broken.

I have an old MCF file that I was able to make work after I'd deleted the ini files and everything else.

The broken thing seems to be an MCP file.

The Options allows a path to the project file to be set, but although I have two backups, they're both datestamped 24/12 and if I rename one of them to match the one in use -- having exited and backed up the working one first -- I get the previous behaviour of no LBC etc.

So the backups are over 20Mb. The in use one is 2.15K.

What do MCP files do? The new one just looks like text, but the huge older ones have text and binary content, by the look of things -- likely corruption, perhaps?

Annoyingly, I don't have a backup MCF that I can find, dated later than May 2020. But at least I have a working LBC again!

I'm going to reinstall Listary now and see if that was a coincidence!

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