Merging field data with formatted text

[stephiesmith1]

I had a hard time even coming up with a subject for this post and I'm not sure that merging is what I need to do, so I will appreciate any input on this problem ...

I have a IWP performance review database. Employees go in and do their self-review, give peer inputs and if they are Team Leads or Supervisors, they do those reviews for the employees they are over. There are between 5 and 10 measures for each position, i.e., a Sr. Software Engineer has 8 measures, an Administrator has 10.

The FMP layout mode allows me to have 12 letter-size pages. Normally, there would be 13 pages for someone with 10 measures, i.e., a first page that gives the review scores and other summary info, a page for each measure which shows the measure number and description, lists the names and scores by Employee, Team Lead, and Supervisor and all of their comments which have been merged into a field called Comments 1, Comments 2, etc; a Goals page which lists current and next year goals, and a final page of Additional Comments, where peer inputs are added in by the supervisor if he so desires.

I have a layout for each position (e.g., a layout for someone with 5 measures, someone with 6 measures, someone with 7 measures, etc.), and I already changed the 10-measures layout so that the last 2 pages are crammed into one page due to the 12 page layout issue and I was just hoping that the 4 people who fall in this category don't have a lot of additional comments.

THE PROBLEM: Some people write so much that their comments for one measure is longer than one page.

The CFO doesn't care if a new measure starts at the top of a page as I have it set up now, or if it just starts right after the last measure but he doesn't want someone's comments getting cut off as they are now, so I was thinking that maybe I could merge everything on a record/assessment to get rid of blank space in one comment that could be used where another comment is extremely long. But is there any way to do this and retain formatting? I realize I can't have fill colors (I assume) behind blocks of text, but can I even format scores (numbers) that are being shown through a portal, etc., so that the pages look nice? Or is there a different type of solution to this problem that I should consider (for instance, a wild thought is maybe I could have 2 layouts so that the 12 page thing isn't an issue, but then is there a way to add the info together to pdf or would someone have to manually add the two pdf's together in Acrobat for each record?)

I'm attaching a pdf showing the first two pages of a sample assessment. Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

Stephie Smith

record_example.pdf

[comment]

I didn't understand your description the first time I read it, and I don't understand it now, so I may be way off - but here's an idea:

Make each review a separate record in a Reviews table. Each record should have the Reviewer's ID and the Reveiwed ID, in addition to the text itself.

Create a report layout based on the Reviews table. Put all the other information in the Header, SubSummary and GrandSummary parts. Now each review can be several pages long.

[stephiesmith1]

This sounds like it might be a solution, so I'm going to work on it today and see what happens. (I've never done a report, so I'll have to look into that first.) Thanks for the suggestion. I'll keep you posted.

Stephie