Tip #15Kinesense LE

How to customise the Word tags report in the Settings Editor

Choose the columns, date formats, header image, margins and footer of the tags report exported to Word, used by police as a viewing log.

Patricia McCabeSoftware Engineer

More Settings Editor goodness for you today, this time we’ll be taking a look at the Tags Report Output tab. In previous posts we’ve looked at the Video Title Slide Layout tab and the Digital Evidence Info tab.

Exporting Word report from Tags

After adding tags in the Review tabs, one of the ways of getting that information out of Kinesense is to export a tag report to Word. This feature is used our police customers as a ‘viewing log‘ for case review. This requires that you have Microsoft Word installed on your machine. To do this, make sure you have the tags you want selected and then just click the Export To Tag Report button.

The Actions toolbar in the Tags tab with the Export To Tag Report button highlighted.

When you first do this, your output will look something similar the output below, containing a lot of default header text and columns.

A default tags report in Word, with placeholder header text and columns for date, time, source, summary and still image.

Customising Tag Report

Adding custom headers, images and columns to your report can be done though the Settings Editor. Open up the Settings Editor and select the Tags Report Output tab.

The Tags Report Output tab of the Settings Editor, listing column data and document settings.

Column Data

The settings are divided up into two section, the column data which relates to what information in contained in the different columns, and document settings which is for general document settings. When adding or customising an existing setting there are 4 different bits of information you can add.

The first is Column Type. Here you can chose from 9 different options. These are:

  • blank: Just a blank column that you can give a name too and then fill in the data later within Word
  • custom: This adds a custom source that is taken from the video source metadata
  • recodringdatetime: Adds the date and time of the tag as displayed in the tags tab
  • realdatetime: Adds the original date and time from the recording
  • readandrecordingdatetime: Shows both display and recording times. Which of these is displayed first can be changed by typing in either “real” or “recording” into Data Format

A column set to realandrecordingdatetime with the header “Original and Display Time” and data format “recording”.

  • videosourcename: Name of the video source where the tag was taken from
  • notes: Comments on the tags
  • image: The default image from the tag video clip
  • videosourcegroup: Name of the video source group that the video source belongs to

Column Header is the text that will appear in the header for that column. Data Format is used for fields that contain dates and times. This changes how the dates and times are shown. You can read more about the different formatting in Custom Date and Time Format Strings.

If you’re adding a custom column type you can add the name of the source in the Custom Source field. These come from the video source metadata which can be added through the import wizard or once the video had been imported though the video info button.

The video details window with custom metadata fields, including location and opponent.

Two custom columns whose custom sources are Opponent and Location.

Document Settings

The document settings deal with headers, image sizes and margins of the document. There are 5 Code Name types to choose from:

  • DefaultImageWidth: The width of the images displayed within the table can be set here
  • DocMargins: Changing this will alter the margins of the exported Word document
  • DocFooterText: Adds footer text to the report
  • DocHeaderImage: Sets the path of the header image and it’s width
  • DocHeaderText: Adds header text, sets the size of the text and whether or now the head is bold

Of course these settings can be removed or added as you like. And as always you can restore the default settings. Hopefully that’ll make tag report exports even easier.

Here’s one I made earlier!

Customised tags report settings with custom columns, a header image and header text.

A customised tags report in Word with a team logo header, custom columns and still images.

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