Useful Tools and Features

The sections of this guide are:

The SOAPnote Helper Tool

The ‘Create & Edit’ page — www.soapnote.org/generator — has a ‘Helper Tool’ to assist with building SOAPnote forms and calculators.

You’ll see a menu titled ‘Tool’ near the top of the screen. When you choose that, you’ll activate the Helper Tool and can choose from different SOAPnote Tags to build. It’s useful for double checking parameters and format of these tags.

Quick Fill Buttons

The ‘Create & Edit’ page — www.soapnote.org/generator — has ‘Quick Fill Buttons’ to assist with building SOAPnote forms and calculators.

You’ll see a series buttons at the left running vertically on the screen. When you click a button, it will insert a form field at the location of the cursor.

Saving Your Progress

There are a few ways to save your work offline. You can ‘Email the Output’ with the button found below the output on each SOAPnote page.

You can also view or save the output as a CSV (comma separated value) file, also with buttons below the output (‘Save to CSV’ and ‘Show CSV’). CSV files are the most basic type of table or spreadsheet files.

For CSV output to work predictably and reliably, it does require that the SOAPnote Tags each be named in a specific way. For a tag’s output to be saved to column on a CSV file, it needs to have the following format: Variable_#. For instance, Variable_1, Variable_2, etc. Since this is a feature added in 2019, not all tools at the SOAPnote Project have this naming convention. This is an important warning to heed if you’re looking to retrieve your work from offline to pickup where you left off.

Picking Up Where You Left Off

For SOAPnote tools which are properly configured for saving and retrieving CSV files (see above), you can pick up where you left off by using the ‘Fill from CSV’ or the ‘Fill from CSV data’ buttons.

Hacks and Tricks

– Text Areas with default text are the best way to showcase a good SOAP note and also serve as useful templates to other people.
– The Muskuloskeletal Exams page is actually several sets of Text Areas. By choosing an exam at the top Select Box, Conditional elements hide or reveal the proper Text Areas. See it at www.soapnote.org/musculoskeletal/musculoskeletal-exams.
– The default width for Text Areas is set to work with any device. Sometimes it seems to narrow for bigger forms, though. Setting the columns (‘cols’) parameter to 65 is a good compromise – It’s the largest width that will still display well on most mobile devices and desktop computers. See it at www.soapnote.org/musculoskeletal/low-back-pain-exam.