Speed Up Your Psych Reports!

Hey everyone! It's been a little while but I've got a great new resource for you!

A while ago, I noticed that I was wasting a lot of time typing the same things into my psychological reports over and over and over and over and... I couldn't help but feel like there was a better way. I noticed that some of my colleagues avoided this problem by copying and pasting out of their old reports, but they often expressed frustration at missing a gender pronoun or two even after proofreading, which made for some embarrassing meetings. I started researching ways to make the recurring parts of a psychological report go faster and smoother.

First of all, I hit upon the idea of using a Custom Office Template which contained my letterhead and a lot of information that was generalized to ALL psych reports I write. This led my reports to look like something like this:

Student Name: Insert Name Here
Student Grade: Insert Grade Here
Reason For Referral: Insert Reason For Referral Section Here

My next breakthrough (after upgrading to Office 2013) was to create more narrowly-individualized Quick Parts for large chunks of text that needed some degree of customization (such as the Reason For Referral section for a re-evaluation). After entering in my quick part, I could go through and use the "Find and Replace" setting to customize everything further. Eventually I had three or four Quick Parts for each assessment instrument in my library. After pulling the quick parts, my template looked something like this:

Student Name: Name
Student Grade: Grade
Reason For Referral: Name is a Grade grade student at (REDACTED) Elementary School. Name was referred for an evaluation by his/her parents due to the fact that...

 The final piece was discovering that I could use Custom XML Variables embedded within the template and the Quick Parts to automatically include individualized information which gets repeated multiple times in the report. This caused my report (with the quick parts added) to look something like this:

Student Name: <Name>
Student Grade: <Grade>
Reason For Referral: <Name> is a <Grade> grade student at (REDACTED) Elementary School. Name was referred for an evaluation by <his/her> due to the fact that...

...admittedly that doesn't look like too much of a change, but when you consider that if I enter the student's name in place of where it says <Name>, anywhere that the student's name appears in the template or in any Quick Part automatically and immediately updates to the thing that I've replaced it with... now we're in business! I noticed that I was taking about 30 minutes to one hour less on average to write each report I was generating!

Of course, I wouldn't be the school psych nerd that I am if I didn't pass these time savings right along to you, dear reader! I've compiled a two-part YouTube video series on how to make these changes yourself. Check it out using the links below!