After speaking at length with Janaya Fix, product manager, (during the Inspection Fuel event) and Diego Caja (on a recent phone conversation), I've been asked to submit the following feedback for the possible benefit of the development team:

Narrative text stored in inspection templates can be cleverly marked with red text to produce a convenient way to make every canned statement far more unique to each issue by using red text to highlight the few words or phrases that need to be specific. (Otherwise, most canned text text entries tend to remain almost sterile of truly useful information for the reader out of the necessity to make each statement as "universal" or "evergreen" as possible.)

When marking the critical words or phrases with red text, and then using a search function that identifies the red text and selects it, the red text may be over-written with the specific black text by simply typing new characters. (I believe this also works for voice-to-text insertions.)

In this manner, more detailed and more helpful narrative statements can be created and carefully edited before being included in the template. Then, when selected by a inspector for inclusion in a report, the inspector needs to pay attention ONLY to the few characters being replaced. (This helps make each report be far more focused on the actual conditions, while eliminating much of the usual typing, editing, and reviewing burdens from the inspector.)

I've used this "next red" macro concept in three ways: 1) to force each inspector to look at each descriptive answer (to avoid carelessly overlooking the inadvertent inclusion of incorrect default descriptive entries; 2) to create more effective and efficient narrative text references; and 3) to temporarily mark statements in the field that will need later attention before actually publishing the report.

I would be happy to explain more if anyone on the development team is interested. My direct cell phone number is 208-863-5357.

Sincerely,

Stan Audette