Do you still use the stock black/green and then red for the summary?
Blue!..Yep!
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All black text through the report, summary included.
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I use HIP. I use black through the body and red for issues. Hip automatically populates the summary page with the items I have marked in red. Colors are of personal preference.
I used to have my summary in red. I switched it to blue a couple months ago.
I watched internachi’s “Home Inspector Questions for Real Estate Agents with Majordomo and Realtors” video that included a handful of realtors giving their 2 cents on inspection and reports… A couple of them mentioned how they HATE when the report is filled with excessive red lettering. They thought that it makes a client nervous to see these pages filled up with red letters.
And it might sound kinda silly, but that actually makes sense to me. There is a large amount of research showing that the color red subconsciously makes people more nervous and the color blue subconsciously makes you calmer. I make urgent/safety concerns a darker, bolder blue so there is some extent of differentiation. I don’t need the color of the font to convey urgency, my words can do that just fine.
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My summary is at the beginning of the report and it is short, to the point and only for the major/expensive/safety defects as I judge them. It is not shaded in a special color. Apparently, I am in the minority (not for the first time), but I don’t see the point of reports that “summarize” every single defect or comment with the exact wording from the report and then continue with the body of the report re-detailing the summary.
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@mschneider5 Are you using HIP-6? I’ve been looking to change the “Black/Red” colors to “Black/Black” or “Black/Blue”. I don’t care for the whole summary being in red myself…
Hm - it looks like I’m using HIP v.5.9.4.
It takes a while, but I went through all my saved comments and manually changed them to blue.
It’s a really weird and time consuming process and one of the reasons I’m excited to be switching over to spectora, but you have to go to Report Settings → Formatting → Advanced Color Options and from there you can add colors. One you add them there, you’ll be able to go into each individual saved comment and change the font color. You can then add them as " Red > > > " and htyell be added as the color you picked.
My words are black my background is white. To the point, no gimmicks it’s not confusing and easy to read.
It’s easy to see it’s the summary page because there’s a big black words that say “summary”.
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I’m using H-6. I built my first template from scratch and the learning curve was pretty steep as most of the tutorials were based on previous versions of the software early on, and never figured out how to change the whole “Black/Red” thing so I just ran with it. That one template took what felt like forever to make.
Funny how someone that writes software for a living has it in their heads that “simple” should take 10-20 steps instead of 2-3. LOL. I sent an email to the support folks to find a shortcut. Maybe @dmaricic could chime in on this here too…
Right there with you. Simple is good. If only I didn’t have to spend 3 months of Sundays building and changing templates around… I have better thing to do than to be sitting at my desk for hours on end yelling at the computer. Technology and I aren’t the best of friends. 
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To change what colors black/red assign go to Report Settings => Formatting and change the minor/serious damage panel colors to whatever you want. Those will then become the “default” colors. You can use the Advanced Color feature if you want to add additional colors when a narrative goes to the summary or not. You want to put those as your most common colors so you don’t have to manually make any changes.
You can also link the Advanced Colors in with the multiple summary feature if you want to separate the summary by contractor, severity, system, etc.
@mdurante nothing in HIP should take 10-20 steps. We’ve spent a massive amount of time working with inspectors to minimize clicks EVERYWHERE. If something is taking that long definitely message me or support to find out the correct method.
The speed of HIP is why so many franchises and the largest inspection companies in the US and other countries use HIP. We have so many amazing new features that have been released this year and there’s a ton more coming out soon!
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