[sims] Constructing individual report assessment tags in excel?

[Ecclesbury]

I'll be honest, Word is not my strong suit so this might be a silly question.

 

Has anyone been able to construct assessment tags for individual reports in Excel? I had a little play but I'm afraid I don't quite understand exactly how the tags are constructed. The important bits between what I guess are custom formatting marks ( something like ^|^ ) are problematic. Would it even be possible to create something like this in excel that can be pasted into Word? I fear I already know the answer to that...

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

There is a lot of flexibility between using Excel and Word if you understand VBA. From what you've written above, I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to achieve. Do you want an Excel table in your Word document? Or are you trying to get assessment data in to Excel?

[Ecclesbury]

So in a SIMS individual report template it's common to have a table with a column with loads of assessment manager result fields. These are normally added using the Capita add in which generates what looks like a merge field. When you have a lot of these to add it can be very time consuming. My thought was to try and automatically generate these from Excel to save time. Initially I was trying to just generate the tags as a simple string, but I suspect this isn't going to work.

 

VBA is a good thought. I suppose there will be a way to actually generate the whole word table (rather than an excel equivalent) and then copy this directly into the individual report template. At the moment I'm a bit lost with how the tag itself is generated though. I'll keep digging.

[pubgrub277]

Its made up of the gradsetId and aspectID from what I remember. the ^|^ distinguish the breaks in the pattern of the string of code

 

I've tried this in the past and had some success, but its fickle and prone to breaking. remember to "validate template" in the word doc template, this should pickup any erroneous string of inserted results/fields in the report.

[bobsmith]

If you master the find and replace technique for the resultset then the same report can be used all year long - saving hours and hours.

 

As much as I love doing whizzy things in Excel this would end up costing me more time than simply blasting the aspects using the sims word add-in.

[Ecclesbury]

If you master the find and replace technique for the resultset then the same report can be used all year long - saving hours and hours.

 

As much as I love doing whizzy things in Excel this would end up costing me more time than simply blasting the aspects using the sims word add-in.

 

That is where I fear I'm at with this to be honest. I might see what I can do as an intellectual exercise if I ever get the time but this issue comes up less frequently these days (and I've already blasted through the one that prompted it again!)

 

I do love a find and replace, mind!