Help me improve document efficiency... OpenOffice

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Ok here’s the deal. I work at a medical office and we still use paper.

There are two pages that need to be put into a chart for next day patients. One is a superbill (a medical bill with ICD9 codes and procedures listed for reference) and the other is a Progress Report (which lists a bunch of categories with spaces for the doctor to write updates on the patient’s health).

Both the Bill and the PR are separate OO (OpenOffice) documents.

The Bill has the following table cells for information:
Patient ID #
Patient Name
Date of Service

The PR has the following cells for information:
Patient Name
Patient Date of Birth
Date of Service

I’d like to “link” these two cells somehow so that what I type into one types into the other. That way I can put both the Bill and the PR in a single 2-page document, and type the information into the Bill (which is the first page) and have it similarly show up on the PR. Right now, entering the same information twice is a pain in the ass. I will probably change the Bill to also include the patient’s DOB (unnecessary, but this way I won’t have to scroll down at all).

Anyone have any better ideas, or know if this is doable in OO?

2

Sorry, is this using the Word clone or the Excel clone?

3

If it’s Calc: =Sheet<#>.<cell>
e.g., =Sheet1.A1 to copy the A1 cell from Sheet 1 into the current cell.

If Writer: =<Table1.A1>
(Just put the cursor in the cell that should contain the copy, press = to bring up the cell editor, click on the cell to copy, and then Enter)

But at a quick test, it doesn’t work on text.

4

Ahh that’s a solution I probably should have thought of, but if it doesn’t work on text…

I’ll test it out see if I can get it work with text. Maybe throw some quotes in there?

And I was using the Writer instead of the Spreadsheet, but I can probably remake the forms into Spreadsheets without much trouble. It might even be more convenient, since wrestling with table dimensions in Writer is kind of a PITA when the table takes up the whole page.