P2P

Spring23

Peer to Peer: ILTA's Quarterly Magazine

Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/1496203

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38 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S P R I N G 2 0 2 3 A B I L I T Y T O S T O R E A N D R E - U S E Q U E S T I O N N A I R E A N S W E R S : During the course of a case or engagement, you may generate multiple documents from many different templates. It's generally not acceptable that you would have to re-enter the same information each time. Therefore, it's important that you can save your responses to the questions in the questionnaire for future use. You would probably also want the ability to add new information to an existing set of answers, or change a previous response and save it. Many DA platforms allow this and if it's an offered feature, it should be easy and logical to use. A B I L I T Y T O P U L L I N F O R M AT I O N F R O M D ATA B A S E S I N T O T H E Q U E S T I O N N A I R E O R D O C U M E N T D I R E C T LY For example, you may require the ability to connect to an external database and pull previously entered information into your questionnaire. The database may be a matter management system, Outlook, an Access or SQL database, or anything else. The goal would be to avoid any redundant data entry. A B I L I T Y T O A D D H E L P T E X T I N T H E Q U E S T I O N N A I R E If you intend to use your DA system as a teaching tool (highly recommended) or simply want the ability to present users with additional help or factors to consider when responding to a question, then you need the ability to provide question-specific help text. A B I L I T Y T O G E N E R AT E M U LT I P L E D O C U M E N T S F R O M O N E Q U E S T I O N N A I R E You may often generate a set of documents that use the same information in various ways. Further, you may want the end result to be one word processor file comprised of each component document in succession; or you may want each component document to be generated and saved as a separate word processor file. I personally prefer separate documents, but make sure the platform you're evaluating can generate multiple documents at once, and that the result is your preferred arrangement (one big file comprised of multiple documents or each document produced as a separate file). F L E X I B I L I T Y R E G A R D I N G T Y P E S O F Q U E S T I O N S ( D ATA T Y P E S ) P R E S E N T E D When gathering the information necessary to generate a document, a system should offer options for the following types of inputs: true/false, multiple choice, text, date and number. True/false questions present Yes or No options. Multiple choice questions should allow options for selecting only one or all-that-apply. If only one answer can be selected, you may also want the option to choose "other" wherein the user types whatever they want. If all-that- apply is selected, then the template should have the ability to punctuate the list of items checked, and you may require the ability for the template to count how many items were selected which would control other language. For example, a template questionnaire may ask which utilities will be paid for by the tenant via multiple choice. If one utility is selected, the sentence may begin "The Tenant will pay for the following utility…" but if more than one is selected, it would need to begin "The Tenant will pay for the following utilities…" Finally, you may want the ability to add a "none of the above" option for an all-that-apply multiple choice. You may need the ability to set minimum or maximums on number variables. You may need the ability to automatically format dates a certain way when inserted into the document, regardless of the way the user entered it. The point is that the questionnaire is very important to the process. You want maximum flexibility regarding the Q 1 W H I T E P A P E R S

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