Exercise 9 - Anonymising and Personalising a chronology

Chronolator can anonymise a document according to the entries in its Abbreviations Glossary. It can be hard for a reviewer to build up a mental picture of the people involved in a case when they are only referred to by their initials, so Chronolator allows you to switch between anonymised and personalised views.

This exercise anonymises a document by replacing definitions in the Abbreviations Glossary with their abbreviations.

Sometimes you might want to anonymise a document by replacing real names with fictitious ones. You can do that with a combination of the techniques below and those in Exercise 10 - Updating the Abbreviations Glossary:

Firstly, anonymise the document as described in this exercise; then change the definitions for an abbreviation in the Glossary; finally, personalise the document as described here.

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.	This document has already been anonymised, as you can see from the first two rows which mention GP1 and Midwife 1:
3	Press Tools > Glossary > Anonymisation and Review:	The Anonymisation and Review form is displayed showing the abbreviations in the document and their definitions: Note that GP1 is Arthur Clements and Midwife 1 is Paula Johnson.
4	Press the All button at the top of the form and then the Personalise one at the bottom. DO NOT tick the Use formatting box. You can select particular entries to process by ticking the boxes next to them individually, but for this exercise we have done them all.	The abbreviations in the document are replaced by their definitions:
Be careful to follow the remaining steps exactly, as the Use formatting box has significant effects on Anonymisation and Personalisation.
5	Press Tools > Glossary > Anonymisation and Review.	The Anonymisation and Review form is displayed.
6	Tick the Use formatting box.	Message 7010 is displayed: The *formatting* you are about to apply will be lost when certain other features are used. It is recommended that you do not anonymise a document with formatting until you have finished with those other features. See Message 7010 for details of which features might lose highlighting. This message is only displayed once in a Word session.
7	Press OK to dismiss the message.
8	Press Anonymise.	The definitions in the document are replaced by their abbreviations, which are *Bold, Italic, and Underlined*: Formatting abbreviations like this makes them stand out in the document. It can also be used to selectively process abbreviations, as we will see in the next few steps.
9	Press Tools > Glossary > Anonymisation and Review.	The Anonymisation and Review form is displayed.
10	Don’t change anything. Press the Personalise button.	The document is personalised.
11	Press Tools > Glossary > Anonymisation and Review.	The Anonymisation and Review form is displayed.
12	Un-tick the Use formatting box. Press the Anonymise button.	The document is anonymised without any formatting being applied.
13	Press Tools > Glossary > Anonymisation and Review.	The Anonymisation and Review form is displayed.
14	Tick the Use formatting box Press the Personalise button.	Message 7033 is issued. Because there are no abbreviations in the document which are *Bold, Italic, and Underlined*, no changes are made.
15	Press OK.	No changes have been made to the document.
16	Press Tools > Glossary > Anonymisation and Review.	The Anonymisation and Review form is displayed.
17	Experiment with different combinations of the buttons and boxes on the form.	To see the results, close the form with the Close button in the bottom right hand corner. If you want to re-open it, press Tools > Glossary > Anonymisation and Review.
18	Close SampleCompositeChronologyHealth without saving changes.

This exercise has introduced you to the Anonymisation and Personalisation feature. Using the different buttons and boxes you can produce a document where some abbreviations are formatted and some are not, making some participate in Personalisation and some not.

Don’t forget that all this work could be lost next time you use the Check Tables button (and some others), so only do it if you have completed your work with them.

Remember also that the more complex the work you do, the harder it might be to recreate it if needed, and the harder it might be for someone else to understand the results. Keep it simple!