New: Choose How Your Feedback Is Formatted When You Copy It

If you've used WritingPAD before, you know the workflow: type or speak your notes, hit Transform, review the output, then copy it into your ePAD. That last step — getting the text into your ePAD — is where things could get slightly awkward. WritingPAD gave you one block of text, and if your ePAD system expected a different shape, you'd end up editing it after pasting.

The reality is that there's no single ePAD in the UK. The MYEPAD consortium uses PebblePad across 28 universities in the Midlands, Yorkshire, and East. Pan London's 14 universities use the MyProgress ePAD. Plymouth, Wolverhampton, and others run their own systems. And if you're a practice assessor in a busy trust supervising students from more than one university — which many of you are — you might be pasting feedback into two or three different platforms in the same week.

We've addressed that. When you copy your feedback now, you can choose from three formats. The one you pick is remembered for next time, so you set it once and forget about it.

The Three Formats

When you scroll down to the "Copy This Feedback" section after transforming your notes, you'll see three buttons: Flowing, Compact, and Sections. Here's what each one does and when you'd use it.

Flowing is the default. It gives you a single, clean paragraph with no labels or headers. This is the format designed to drop into a PebblePad comment box, a MyProgress feedback field, a PARE entry, or any single-textarea ePAD without leaving stray formatting behind. If you're not sure which to pick — especially if you work across multiple universities' ePAD systems — this is the safest starting point. Most ePADs present a single text field per assessment point, and a flowing paragraph fits that well regardless of which platform you're using.

Compact puts brief inline labels at the start of each part — Met:, Gaps:, Actions: — separated by a pipe character. Everything stays on one logical line. This could be useful if you're pasting into a single text field but want someone reviewing the feedback later (your academic assessor, say, or a moderator) to be able to scan the structure at a glance. It adds just enough visual signposting without introducing line breaks that some systems strip out.

Sections gives you the full labelled output with [Strengths], [Areas for Development], and [Feedforward / Action Plan] as headers, each on its own line with a blank line between them. This is the format you'd use if you're filling in a paper PAD or a multi-field ePAD where you're pasting each section into its own box. It's also handy if you're saving the feedback to your notes app first and want it to be easy to read on your phone later.

A Small Reminder That Matters

You'll also notice a short line in amber text near the copy button: "Check for patient identifiers before pasting into your ePAD."

WritingPAD already strips identifiable information — NHS numbers, patient names, and similar — from your output. But once the text is on your clipboard, it's out of our hands. The reminder is there because best practice is always to give the output a quick scan before you paste it into a system that's part of the student's permanent record. Most of the time there'll be nothing to catch, but the one time there is, you'll be glad you looked.

Per-Field Copy Buttons Are Still There

The format toggle controls the "Copy All" section at the bottom of your results. But the individual copy buttons next to each section — Strengths, Areas for Development, Feedforward — haven't changed. If your ePAD has separate fields and you want to copy one section at a time, those buttons still give you the raw text for that section only. Use whichever approach fits your system.

Why This Update?

The UK's ePAD landscape is fragmented by design — regional consortia like MYEPAD and Pan London each chose platforms that work for their universities, and individual institutions often have their own systems on top of that. That's fine for students, who typically use one university's system. But practice assessors often supervise students from multiple universities across different placements, which means dealing with whichever ePAD each university uses.

Rather than bake in one format and hope it works everywhere, we built the choice into the tool. Your preference is saved locally on your device, so after you pick the format that fits your most common system, it's there every time. If you switch between systems, changing the format is one tap.

This is part of a broader effort to make the step between "WritingPAD generated my feedback" and "it's in my ePAD" as short as possible. The format selector is the first piece. We're exploring further ways to reduce that gap, and we'll share more as those take shape.

Try It Now

Next time you transform your notes, look for the three-button format selector below the copy button. Tap one, see the preview change, and copy. Your choice is saved automatically. If you have thoughts on which formats work best with your ePAD system — or if something pastes unexpectedly — we'd like to hear about it. Use the feedback thumbs below your results or drop us a note.