Custom Template Generation Services and Consulting

Your solution for spreadsheets, document templates, and other small-scale personal and business solutions.

I'm KD, and I've spent over a decade creating and maintaining doucumentation at a corporate level. I've written in basic text editors, standard word processing, and funky online text entry boxes that never let you see what's going on behind the scenes until you click the view source (and reveal some mess it auto-generated after all you've done is remove and retype a single word). I make Excel forms to manage my budget, to create form letters, and to organize my wardrobe and makeup stash. I take your tedious processes, including the household ones, and simplify them.

Who are these services for?

• Those with a committment to consistent branding in their documentation
• Those with varying degrees of software experience across their team and don't want that to hold anyone back from doing their best work
• Those who have a vision and don't want to waste valuable time trying to understand why that blank space simply will not delete, no matter which keys are mashed, how many times they hit backspace
• Those who want sustained support to evolve as their brand grows and reshapes
• Those who want to click "Save" once and not feel the need to refresh the page endlessly to see if their changes look how they imagined.
• Those who are tired of trying to remember what they did last year for this exact same problem, when they wondered the exact same thing the prior year, and somehow, came to an entirely different solution and worry if they're getting the same result.

What We Offer

• Services - all services include a consultation session, regular check-ins, and directions for use with the completed document(s)
  • Templates - the same look, the same process, reliable output, every time
    • Word: A prepared document, a custom styleset
    • HTML: A .html or .txt file containing the basic elements for your document, a custom stylesheet (integreated, or as its own file)
  • Mailmerge Components - send the same emails, create the same letters, consistently and reliably
    • Word Templates: A prepared document, a custom styleset, and directions for use (yes, even what to answer for the popups!)
    • Excel Input Sheets: A prepared spreadsheet with easily understandable headers, any field validations desired
  • Consulting and Process Optimization - tell me about your time sinks. We will work together to make them easier for you and everyone on your team
  • Spreadsheets - limited cell size, unlimited flexibility
    • Calculators: Labeled fields, inputs tailored to exactly what you need, no more, no less
    • Generators: When you say "134512", I say "The student Jane Doe is currently performing at average level for her grade and is currently achieving a B in English, a C in Mathematics" and so on. Generators can take an input and from the stored data and predetermined text blocks, assemble a form letter. Can be used in combination with a Mailmerge, or, to generate copy/pasta data for your daily use.
    • Order Forms: Often ordering for a group? Simplify it! Group members can enter food preferences, allergies, sizing information, and other data, and you can retrive it concisely with a dropdown or other input.
• Principles
  • Portability: We customize our templates, taking into account the operating system, comfort, and specific use cases of the user
  • Flexibility: Our templates are based entirely in stylesheets - no tediously combing through a document trying to find what is making a single word print in a different font
  • Continuity: The templates we provide you will be continuously supported for revisions as your needs evolve. Lost or broken a template? We keep records of all of the work we complete for our clients and can always send you a fresh copy.
  • Accessibility: Our templates are labeled for ease of understanding and we offer guides and personalized training to their use as well to be broadly understood by every user.

Great! Help me out, I need this in my life!

Send me a note and I'll draft an estimate!

kd.consulting [at] gmail [dot] com

Use the following template

Name:
Company: (if applicable)
Project Summary: (a brief description of what you're looking to accomplish together)
Deadline Constraints: (important for me to know if I'll be able to take on your project or not)
Primary Operating System(s): (include if Android or Apple or other mobile devices are intended)
Is this for commercial use? (this allows me to provide you with the relevant disclosures, and also to protect your data)
Anticipated Number of Users: (ballpark - this allows me to estimate training time for your group)
Do you see this as an evolving project? (allows me to build in flexibility, and to maintain documentation of my own processes that will help in future adjustments)

Why Write in HTML? Isn't that kind of... last decade?

My philosophy on this is that there is a certain type of person who thrives in a rich text editor when formatting is key and the product is meant to be compatible across platforms, and many of the current workforce are not trained to be that person. This leaves a few options:

• Uptraining. It can be costly, frustrating to the user, and a repeated time investment that may not stick for many.
• Troubleshooting baffling errors, many hours sunken into uncovering where those errors are coming from, and frustration
• Items on a page that just don't "look right" and are left as a problem for tomorrow, and the next day, until the next day becomes never, and these problems compounding every time an update is processed to the document.

An HTML template gives you simple consistency that can be dropped into any text editor so that you get the same result, every time, with minimal training.

The person, or organization, or even family newsletter writer and historian most suited for our services is someone who isn't hiring web developers as writers. They're hiring writers as writers. They themselves are the writer.

Where my experience helps you is that I'm both. I take your vision and translate it into something as simple as a form that can be used again and again, with the same consistent results every single time.

Excel? Couldn't I find a calculator online?

Absolutely! Calculators exist for everything online now, and in many cases, are just fine solutions for simple everyday calculations.

My work is for things that are not quite so simple, or that include sensitive data you don't want to type into a web form, or that you want to consistently have at your fingertips whenever you need them and not worry if the one website you trust is down. My work is for year over year, long-term projects that you want to build once and never have to think about the configuration of again, and when you do, you want someone who has documented exactly how it was made and can quickly complete your updates while you go on with your life.

My Experience

• Large scale conversion of Word documents into an online Knowledge Base with limited Rich Text capabilities in which ordered lists, tables of contents, and other text element functions and formatting needed preservation to maintain brand conformity.
• Freelance Excel work
  • Forms to return a personalized letter based on simple, understandable user inputs
  • Custom input sheets to use in conjunction with Word's Mailmerge function to mass-generate documents, emails, and even individual PDFs
  • Calculators - shared costs for the group that's always splitting the bills, sales tax to avoid surprises at the register, installment amortizations, and more
• The classic early 2000s internet starter pack: MySpace, LiveJournal, and Tumblr layouts coded from scratch or cobbled together from other layouts I enjoyed. Frames, unconscionably small text boxes, pastel pink on pastel yellow, all manner of mischief.
• Honorable mention to working with some extremely poorly designed online rich text editors.

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