Making Your Word Template the One Pental Fills

Reports come out two ways and most firms use both. There is a built-in PDF you control entirely from Branding, with nothing to upload, and there is your own Word template, which the platform fills. This is about the second one. It lives under Settings, then Document Templates, and the button is Open the Document Builder. It builds every document type the same way rather than the report alone, which is why it is not called the report builder.

Start from your own report

Upload one of your finished reports or a blank template. It is read and drawn back to you as a document: headings as headings, prose as prose, tables as real grids. Nothing is changed until you save, and you never edit the file itself.

A report you have already delivered is usually the better one to start from, because it shows the builder every section and a real finding written out. A blank template works too; there is just less on screen to point at.

Point at where things go

Click a place in your report, then choose what belongs there from the panel: the fields on every finding, the sections you write once per engagement, the client and the job, your people, the counts. Drag them across instead if you prefer. What you place is marked with a chip, and one click takes it out again.

The panel lists your own setup. A field you have switched off is not offered, one you have renamed appears under your name for it, and anything Pental does not hold yet can be added there and then as a finding field or a report section.

Say what repeats

A report lists findings twice, once as a row in a summary table and once as a section of its own, and both need marking so every finding gets one. Hover a table row and choose to repeat it. On the finding itself, click its heading and choose to repeat that. The finding’s own title is the one heading that changes, so a field goes on it; every other heading names its section and stays.

If you uploaded a finished report

Most firms do, and it needs two things doing. A section written out in full, an executive summary of four paragraphs say, should be replaced as a whole rather than having a field dropped on its first paragraph, or the rest of that wording appears in every report you produce. Every heading offers to replace what is under it.

And the report contains every finding somebody wrote. The moment you mark one as the repeating example, the builder counts the others and offers to remove them, because one example is all a template needs.

This is the part worth being careful about. A template that keeps another client’s wording will carry it into real reports, and nobody notices until it has been delivered.

Let it do the first pass

Build it for me reads your document and fills in what it can in one go: the placements, what repeats, sections it thinks one field stands for, and whether the sample findings should go. Its work is marked apart from yours, it never overwrites a choice you made, and anything it got wrong is one click to remove.

Results vary with the report, so it is a good first pass rather than a finished job and it is worth reading before you save. What it cannot do is produce something broken: every suggestion goes through the same checks as a placement you make by hand, and anything naming a field or a place that does not exist is discarded before it reaches the screen.

Look at it before you commit

Preview builds the template exactly as saving does and fills it with example content, so what you are looking at is the template you are about to save rather than an impression of it. Two example findings, so you can see that a repeating section really repeats.

The panel also says what is still needed and why: without a title every finding is untitled, without somewhere to repeat the report shows one finding however many there are. Saving with something missing is allowed, it just says so first.

Then generate a real one

Run a report from an actual assessment rather than an empty one. Rendering is mechanical, so the same engagement produces the same file every time: if two runs differ, the problem is in the document, and the guide on inconsistent rendering covers why.

Your work is kept as you go. Upload the same file again after a refresh or a closed tab and the builder offers back every mark you had made.