GoReport Creator is a unique toolset that places tremendous power and flexibility into the hands of GoReport clients to design and build their own advanced digital data collection and produce richly formatted word outputs.
This article describes the high-level stages involved in building your own data capture and outputs to create a survey or inspection template. It will also give potential users an idea of what is involved at each stage before considering or commencing a new data capture build.
Note: The GoReport Creator tool is only accessible to GoReport Enterprise clients. To discuss your requirements before using GoReport Creator, please contact helpdesk@goreport.com
Preparation: Preparation is probably the most important phase of considering whether to build your own template using GoReport Creator or use GoReport Consultants to build your survey templates for you. It is always best to discuss your requirements with the GoReport support team before you commence to ensure you get the most out of the time you invest in building your own templates and that the end result meets your expectations.
We recommend you start with a simple and straightforward example and work through all the stages to build your familiarity with the tool.
Create a Capture: GoReport Creator is designed as a “drag & drop” interface with all the functional options and flexibility required to build your data capture. You will find a description and explanation of every function in the GoReport Knowledge Base. Naturally, there will be a learning curve of how to best utilise the functions to create your desired data collection, therefore beginning with a simple example and gradually increasing the complexity will build your confidence and understanding.
Choose or create your output design: The GoReport Creator tool uses Microsoft Word as an output type, which puts a world of publishing format options into the hands of our clients without the need for high level technical skills. A range of sample cover pages are provided with the toolset to enable you to get started quickly and publish an output. From there, you can modify, create and upload your own cover sheets and template layouts and select which options you wish to make available.
Note: Once you have published an output in Word, you can use Microsoft Word's inbuilt PDF 'publish to PDF' option if you choose to distribute your report in this way.
Testing your template: When you are creating your data capture and output format, by default it is not available to general users. Once you are ready to try it out, you can easily make the template available and control visibility by utilising the GoReport Teams functionality >> How to use GoReport Teams
Once you set the template to “Test”, it can be accessed from the Web Portal and the iOS device to capture data. When building a data capture, you will often control the status of a template while it is still a work in progress and you are evolving your design.
When you are ready to test your Template, perhaps with a wider set of users, it is important to manage access using GoReport Teams or via a naming convention or instruction. In any test phase, you will gather feedback and perhaps make changes, therefore it is important that users are not collecting data on “live jobs” at this point.
Review and make changes: There is an endless ability to modify data captures and their published outputs while the template is in the design phase. The design process is iterative and in particular, you will want to create some test data capture in order to further refine your published outputs.
When someone creates a report with the data capture you have designed, it will be automatically “locked” for further changes to prevent confusion or conflicts in the test phase. However, as design is an iterative process, we have created an easy way for the template designer to delete any test reports and to unlock the data collection for further changes. See image below:
After you select "Delete report" a dialog box will appear showing a list of reports created using the test template. The list will help you understand what collected test data is going to be deleted. The prompt is set as a reminder for you to communicate to the test group that they need to delete any reports from their iOS device and to sync when changes have been made.
Once you have finalised your data collection and output, you can proceed to make your template live.
Making a template live: Once you have completed testing and are happy with your data collection and reporting options, you can make your template live by adjusting its status. You can further control access via GoReport Teams.
Once the template has been made “Live”, it cannot be deleted to protect your templates and live data. It can be withdrawn by changing the status to "Archived".
If you have any questions about GoReport Creator or wish to find out more about its use or how to activate the toolset, please contact helpdesk@goreport.com.