So say you want to generate a letter to landowners before you go on a visit, but you're tired of copy-pasting the same text within the same word document or email. "What's their address?" "When did we say we were going to go?".
Landscape Reports have got you covered, but we're going to need to use some of the more advanced features of the Landscape Report function. In doing so, hopefully we can all learn a bit about Reports.
This article is assuming that you've already watched the *awesome* video on Reports and are familiar with how to edit them and how they function within Landscape. This also means I won't be doing a lot of nifty screen grabs of where buttons are. This type of complex report highlights how important it is to have all your data well organized. If any of the fields included are not entered correctly in the record they're associated with, the report won't work.
Before we start, I think it's important to talk about the workflow I envision for monitoring visits. Defining the workflow is important because it helps me decide in which list to build the Report. When I was an easement monitor, I would pick a date for the visit (maybe a couple of weeks out if I was on top of my stuff) and send the landowner an email or letter saying when I was planning on coming. I'm going to build my Report based on that workflow. Since I want my Report to know the date of my upcoming visit, before each visit I'm going to create a Site Visit in Landscape for the date of the upcoming visit, along with the Personnel who will be conducting the visit. And since I want my Report to be able to access this information, I'm going to create a new report with the type: Site Visit.
Step 0.5: Before building the report, and before generating each letter, generate the upcoming site visits and populate them with the information you need.
Head over to a test Stewardship Site and generate a Site Visit from the Work tab. Fill out the upcoming date, as well as the Personnel.
Step 1: Create a new report, and choose the report settings.
Give the report template a snazzy, descriptive name, choose the category 'Site Visits', and then check the box under Expand Results that says 'Create one report for each item in a result's data'. Change the drop down menu to 'Site Visit' --> 'Property Contacts'. 
If you don't choose the Property Contacts associated with Site Visits, you will get an error when you try to run the report.
What you've just done is told Landscape that if there is more than one Property Contact associated with a Site Visit (maybe more than one Landowner, for instance) it will generate a new report for each of those Active Contacts. It also makes the 'Property Contacts' list available to the 'Basic' block within your Report Template, so you can dig in and pull out contact details like phone number and first and last names. Pretty neat.
Change the Filter settings to match the following: 
This will exclude all inactive contacts.
Step 2: Give your report a nice header.
Click the (+) button on the template and add a basic Block (you don't need to use a header block type for this Report).
If you want to add a logo, you'll need to insert an image, resize it, re-align it to the left, and then if you want the text to be in line with the logo, choose the star icon (display option) in the image options, and choose 'Inline'.
Pro tip: If the lines are too spread out, you can use the keyboard shortcut "Shift" + "Enter" to generate returns without the extra spacing.
Step 3: Create the body of the letter.
Here we go. The main event.
To make the main body of your letter look like this:
Add a Basic Block below the header you just created, and edit the block to look like this (use the merge fields button as you go, don't type all those fields out):
(You can also copy/paste the following text, although the formatting will need to be adjusted:
[[@Date:Short]]
[[Contacts.Contact.Addressee]]
[[Contacts.Contact.AddressBlock]]
Dear [[Contacts.Contact.Salutation]],
As you know, we need to visit your property once a year to conduct our annual monitoring visit. We will be visiting your property on [[StartedOn]] at [[StartTime]].
Please let us know:
1) If any changes have occurred on the property in the past year, or
2) If any changes are planned for the coming year.
Thanks very much for your continued commitment to your protected land. We're looking forward to the visit.
*
Step 4: Create the signature and staff contact information.
Since the next part of the letter will need to access the 'Personnel' part of the Site Visit, and since there can be more than one person on a visit, we'll need to create a repeatable field to access that information in Landscape.
Create a new Repeated Content block, and make the type 'Personnel'. Then make the rest of the block look like this:
Since, presumably, there is only one Personnel listed per visit, this will only create one signature per letter. However, if you wanted to get fancy and cover the situation where more than one individual was on a visit, you could use the filter in the repeatable section editor to only list Personnel with, for example, the tag 'Lead'. You would need to add the tag of "Lead" to the Personnel list in settings to make this possible (also you may want to make 'Lead' the default, since this feature won't work if they're not tagged with it, leading to possible confusion down the line).
Press the back button to go back to the list of Report Templates, just to make sure it's saved.
Step 5: Generate report to test, then edit some more.
Generating nice reports requires a lot of testing and tweaking. Even though you followed these instructions, you'll probably need to change something after you generate a test report. Also, it's possible that your organization will need to use different fields to fill out some of the information.
Go to the Site Visit that you created in Step 0.5. You need to navigate to the Site Visit itself, not the list of Site Visits that you see in the Work tab. Click the Report button in the upper left, find the Report you just spent so much time on, and click it to generate your letter. If your Report isn't showing up on the list, then you're in the wrong place, or you chose to associate your Report with the wrong list way back in Step 1.
I probably tested about 20 different iterations of the letter before I had it exactly the way I wanted it. Reports are like that -- lots of trial and error. If you receive an error message, or text on your report saying that something is invalid, the most common error is pulling those merge fields from the wrong list (like pulling Active Contacts from Properties rather than Stewardship Sites). Or check out this article on common report errors.
Once you generate the .pdf, it will separate each letter into its own document, which you can then save automatically to the Site Visit -- another bonus of this workflow! You could also, of course, make a view of your Site Visits and bulk create these Reports that way.
Hopefully this got you thinking about what else you could automate: Landowner approval forms for reserved rights requests? What we used to call a 'Dear Violator' letter for easement violations? The sky is really the limit.
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