Exercise 12 - Making a narrative version of the chronology table

Although tables are a good way to put a chronology together, they can be unwieldy to read, particularly when a single event has a lot of text in one column that spans several pages.

Chronolator can convert a chronology table to a number of narrative formats, some of which include the time that has elapsed since the start of the chronology.

Step	Action	What to expect and other comments
1	Read Chronolator Toolbars and About the Exercises if you have not already done so.
2	Open SampleCompositeChronologyHealth.
3	Press Publish > Custom :	The Published Document Customisation form opens. You can use this form to change how the table headings are displayed. We will just use the defaults for now.
4	Press OK.	A new document is produced containing a narrative version of the chronology table. The standard Word Save As dialog is displayed.
5	Save the document in a convenient place.
6	Look at the way the first event appears:	In the original chronology table: In the narrative: The main heading shows the Date and Time of the event as written in the table The next heading is the Source of Information The following ones include only those table columns in which there was information In the next few steps we shall see how to customise these headings.
7	Close the narrative document.
8	Switch back to SampleCompositeChronologyHealth and press Publish > Custom. Un-tick the Print Column Headings box: Press OK.	A new document is produced containing a narrative version of the chronology table. The standard Word Save As dialog is displayed.
9	Save the document in a convenient place.	Overwrite the earlier narrative document if you want to.
10	Look at the way the first event appears in the narrative:	The Date and Time and Source of Information headings remain, but the other ones are omitted. This results in a shorter document.
11	Close the narrative document.
12	Switch back to SampleCompositeChronologyHealth and press Publish > Custom. Set the form as follows: Tick As in document Tick Elapsed Select Partial Tick Print Column Headings. Press OK.	A new document is produced containing a narrative version of the chronology table. The standard Word Save As dialog is displayed.
13	Save the document in a convenient place.	Overwrite the earlier narrative document if you want to.
14	Look at the way the first two events appear:	In the original chronology table: In the narrative: Ticking Elapsed has made the Date and Time heading of each event include information about how long it has been since the start of the chronology. There are two formats for the Elapsed option. Partial (used here) displays how many days it has been since the first event but shows the time it happened.
15	Close the narrative document.
16	Switch back to SampleCompositeChronologyHealth and press Publish > Custom. Set the form as follows: Tick As in document Tick Elapsed Select Full Tick Print Column Headings	Notice that as you choose different options, their effect is illustrated in the box underneath them:
17	Press OK.	A new document is produced containing a narrative version of the chronology table. The standard Word Save As dialog is displayed.
18	Save the document in a convenient place.	Overwrite the earlier narrative document if you want to.
19	Look at the way the first two events appear in the narrative:	The Elapsed > Full option displays exactly how long it has been since the first event instead of the time it happened.
20	Close SampleCompositeChronologyHealth without saving changes.

In this exercise, you have seen that:

you can translate a tabular chronology into a variety of narrative formats, which can be easier to read and often take fewer pages
some formats include information about the interval between the start of the chronology and each event
the narrative is produced in a separate document, leaving your original chronology unchanged