Using Chronolator Documents
Step by Step Guide
How you make a blank Composite Chronology depends on what type of administrator you are:
If you are a Case Review Administrator | If you are a Local Administrator |
Press the New Composite Chronology button on the Online Workbench toolbar. | Press the Admin > New Composite Chronology button on the Internal Chronology toolbar. |
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Chronolator displays Word's Save As dialog for you to choose what to call the new Composite and where to save it. Enter a suitable name and location and press Save. |
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For maximum compatibility with other Word versions, and to avoid some problems which occasionally arise when emailing Word Macro-Enabled Document files, change the Save as type to Word 97-2003 Document before pressing Save. |
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If you are a Case Review Administrator, the Online Workbench stays open when the Composite Chronology is created. You might need to switch to the Composite Chronology using the Windows taskbar.
If you are a Local Administrator, the Internal Chronology closes and the Composite Chronology is opened.
The Composite Chronology has a new toolbar. Chronolator never displays buttons for irrelevant tasks, so a new Composite Chronology contains just three buttons: |  |
After you have imported the first document, the toolbar expands to include buttons for the other tasks that become possible:
Although Chronolator will have warned people if it found errors in their documents, it cannot force them to correct them. Before you import a document, you should open it and check it using the Check Tables button on its own Chronolator toolbar.
If the document has errors which you cannot correct yourself, ask the person who sent it to you for clarification, or return it to them for correction; it is better to sort things out now rather than later.
If you are satisfied with the document, close it and return to your Composite Chronology.
Press the Import Tables button to display Word's Open dialog. Open the document you want to import. |  |
When you import subsequent documents, Chronolator checks that they relate to the same case and copies all tables matching the Case Details to the end of the Composite Chronology.
After checking that the document contains tables with the right headings, Chronolator asks you to identify where it came from. For example, if you were to import a document from the Police, you might enter this: |  |
When you press OK, Police > will be added to whatever is already in the Source of Information column.
For example, if the Police's document contains this entry . . . |
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. . . after you have imported it, it will look like this: |
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Use the Merge Tables button to combine all the tables in the Composite Chronology into a single table. |  |
Chronolator automatically resizes any tables whose column widths are different from those of the first table.
The various organisations and departments who completed the Internal Chronology documents you distributed will probably have entered dates in a variety of different ways (01.02.16, February 1 2016, 1/2/16 and so on). This does not hamper Chronolator's validity checks, but it does look untidy.
You can use the Format Dates button to put them all into a consistent format. When you press it, you will see today's date displayed in four different formats. Press the one you want. |  |
The available formats present January 26 2020 as 26 Jan 2020 or 2020‑01‑26. The latter is the ISO 8601 format. Both formats can be enhanced with the day of the week, which can be useful for a reviewer trying to establish patterns of behaviour.
Use the Sort Tables button to sort the merged table into the correct order. When you press it, a menu drops down so you can choose whether to sort the table in ascending or descending order.
Press the order you want. Chronolator will sort the table using the Date and Time columns that the Case Review Administrator specified.
Putting dates and times into a consistent format before sorting is recommended as it makes the sort easier for Word, and thus more reliable.
Early versions of Word had a bug which prevented Sort from working in some circumstances. Circumventing that bug was the reason for introducing the ISO 8601 format, which Word unfailingly sorted correctly. If you do encounter problems sorting, try this:
You can use the Check Tables button to make a final check that the Composite Chronology is valid as far as Chronolator is concerned.
In particular, you might want to check that any time-critical events are in sequence if the document does not contain Chronolator's Start Time or Finish Time columns, or if they have not been completed. If they are not, consider using a Sequence column (see Using a Sequence column).
When you have completed a chronology document you can publish it without the Chronolator program code so that your recipients will not have to do anything about macros and licence terms whenever they open it.
Pressing Publish > Exact Copy copies everything to a new document, and then displays Word's Save As dialog so you can choose where to save it.
The original Chronolator document is unchanged by this process.
As well as making an exact copy, you can:
See Publishing a chronology for more details.
