Many of the development techniques mentioned are also used by us. Better to over explain than under.
We will also add bright ‘developer text’ (which has its own style) to layouts and use a Hide condition of ‘1’ so that it is only visible in layout mode. This is especially helpful for overlaid buttons and other things that may not be obvious or for something very important.
We will also create either a dedicated table or just a layout with no records in the solution where we will add information that may not immediately be obvious upon returning to a solution at a later date, or for a colleague working on a solution, or for perhaps a data take on. If the information deserves it, we’ll create a table and use individual records, but if it is a few notes, then we’ll just use the layout background to add text to.
The ‘growing up’ phase really becomes apparent when sharing development or employing staff for the first time. Personal preferences have to give way to procedures and methods, that are agreed within the team.
We utilise OneNote on iPad Pros, MacBooks and Surface Pros/Books and their respective pens for taking notes during meetings. We have notebooks that are shared throughout our team via our Office 365 accounts, allowing information to be shared. Often the hand written notes are typed up to rationalise the notes taken and make the more understandable. No more lugging multiple notepads around and trying to find pages within them.
On workflow, we’ll usually use mind mapping for ‘unloading the brain’ and creating concepts. We’ll even use this to map out a complex calculation journey if needed (particularly if picking up someone else’s work). We’ve owned Mindjet MindManager for years, which is very good but expensive. There are all sorts of alternatives available.
Like many here, Omnigraffle is great for a less structured approach than mind mapping and is used for business process and pretty much any other flow where more control on the layout is needed. There are some good online alternatives as well and Omnigraffle Web will now allow Windows/Linux users to share data.
For clients and internally, where things are not carried out very frequently, but always need time to remember/work out how to do, we create our own PDF ‘Cheat Sheets’, that are a combination of text and screen shots, that save hours of unproductive time. We have used Clarify for this for years, but sadly it is not being updated to 64bit and the online alternatives are currently cost prohibitive for what we need. At the moment, we’ve reverted to Pages and use the standard Mac screen shot short cuts as outlined here: Keyboard Shortcuts to Capture a Screen Shot with Mac OS X | Information Technology Group and, from memory, add the Option key to copy direct to the clipboard for pasting.
For more technical work, such as setting up our Windows cloud servers, the whole process is documented in BBEdit in great detail. This is frequently updated as new servers and updates change the process.
FMPerception is used by us all, but we do not rely on this to communicate between each other.
