Who loves to edit transcript?  Ask that question in a room chock full of reporters and you aren’t likely to see any hands.  And if a few do go up their colleagues will all turn and stare at them as if they’re zoo creatures.

The fact is that there are two parts to every transcript:  the taking of the record and the making of the record, and it is a truism that a hard day at the writer generally leads to a worse day at the office.  So anything that relieves the agony is going to be welcome as a warm fire in winter.

When it comes to speeding up editing, Eclipse is renowned for its extensive arsenal of features that save time and automate tedious, repetitive processes.  Transcripts have several elements.  None are much fun but one is especially wearisome:  Adding and completing the administrative sections of your text.  These are the title pages, appearances, parentheticals, text blurbs, certificates, and, of course, the indexes.

If you’re using Eclipse efficiently, you’ve already put most of these into Block Files that you read into a transcript as necessary.  That helps, but you still run into many, many items that repeat continuously:  witness names, attorneys’ names, appearance address information, days of the week, months of the year, law firms, and so on.

Fill-In-The-Blanks was born for this.  Enter a witness name just once and every instance thereafter is done for you.  Set up running headers that change automatically as the witness or examination changes.  Create the address information for your firms just once and use them again and again in future transcripts.  Don’t type the months of the year every time they occur; instead pick them from a list.  Pick your venues, courts, judges, attorneys and more from lists, too.  Save tens of thousands of keystrokes and tons of time in the process.

How?  Well, (you knew we would say this) Michael is going to cover all the steps.  You’ll learn how to call up the Add a Blank dialog and how to make it work hard for you.  You’ll learn about Field Labels and Variables, adjustable vs. fixed length blanks, how to build and use list files, when to check Prompt for contents and other boxes, and how these Blanks can be used as you create . . .  wait for it . . . an Automatic Index.

That’s right, Eclipsters, the Holy Grail of transcript production, the Automatic Index, leans heavily on the Fill-In-The-Blanks feature.  It has a million and one uses all by itself, but pair it up with the indexing features in Eclipse and, well, it’s a virtual juggernaut.

So sign up today for this incredibly helpful webinar.  Better yet, sign up for the suite and you’ll save some money, too.  Our webinars are $49 each but if you purchase both, you’ll save 10% on the price and you’ll save even more if you apply for CEUs also.  You can file one NCRA form for both webinars, which cuts the cost for points in half. For more information on CEUs see our FAQ http://www.eclipsewebinars.com/faqs_detail.php?category=ceus.   As always, you can interact with Keith and Michael during the live presentations or you can view the recorded version at a
later time that better fits your schedule.