Photo Reports

Hi,

I have been asked to produce a report with staff photos, staff code, name and department.

I have done this, but have hit a snag which means it's in a format which is totally unsuitable for SMT.

Over the years our staff photos have been imported into SIMS in a variety of different sizes, therefore if I run a standard Word list report, I get one photo per page for some staff, for other staff only a passport sized photo.

I have tried to create the report in one of the ready-made templates - the address labels one. I have managed to get it into a format which will pass, but when printing the report insists on printing to the multi-purpose tray. Unfortunately, if pressing print will not cause the report to print, it'll be rejected- I can't expect them to load the tray with paper and then press print.

I have attempted a mailmerge report, but that can't handle the photo, and an RTF report is giving an out of memory error which I assume comes from the size of some of the photos.

This is leaving me having to produce the report manually, copying and pasting staff photos into a document. I'll also have to keep this up-to date with staff changes. We're the third largest secondary school in the country and hold training school status - I can't allow myself to have this job.

Has anyone got a report template I could use or some advice they could give me? Helping me make the labels report print to the paper drawer would be fine, but I can't see a setting anywhere.

Anyone?

Thanks,

Hi

What about printing to PDF I have found this really useful in printing some funny formats out of SIM's.

FREE PDF Printer

Could try above or various other free Prnt to PDF Software.

Thanks Steven. That's worth a thought, but then it's probably more actions required than opening the tray and putting paper in. Or it still requires me to recognise every time a new member of staff has been appointed and run the report again.

It's a workaround, but it isn't ideal.

Personally I would export as a word doc - then in word save as HTML this then saves all the photos in the sub-folder. I would the bulk resize and import back into sims at a smaller size so the sims report looks normal when created.

You can set the size of the photo in the report template... Or use SalamanderSoft photo Extractor tool - SalamanderSoft Limited - Free Utilities

If you get resource issues - and you can't throw SSD\RAM\Network\blah blah at it, filter it, so A-P Q-Z or whatever.

I have a really nice RTF template you can use, but you'll need to fix the photo size first. Either the Salamander Tool or manually using a filtered report would do the trick.

I don't think resizing the photo in the template will work because it will still download the full sized photo. I use a table to force the size of the photo and it's usually fine. We use a similar template for teachers to get class photos. It might take a minute or so to run, but they work really well.

When we take new staff photos, and add them to SIMS, i also dump the information to the intranet and it's stored there for quick retrieval, but it is a manual process, which needs periodic updating.