[sims] Rant + exporting built-in lesson monitor reports to Excel

[syan]

I've been using SIMS for four months now and am quite baffled as to how poor/inflexible some of these lesson monitor reports are. As in, I can't run a simple attendance analysis with YTD att + no of lates by reg grp AND year grp on one sheet!? Instead I have to pick my groups (reg then year) individually thus generating different reports that can't even be outputted to Excel. Sorry, rant over. I come from a Cloud School background where the SQL reports made in MS Report Builder were beautiful.

 

My question is, am I missing something and is there any way to output to Excel while preserving the formatting of the original? Copy-pasting doesn't work and I'm currently having to output it as XML then import to Excel which butchers some of the formatting and therefore another ballache. I'm not aware of any way to get attendance by reg/yr grp in Report Designer.

 

Any help would be appreciated!

[syan]

Thank you to all who responded. After some further SIMS training there still doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to do this. The workaround is to output the report to file and save as .xml, then paste that into your desktop and drag across to a local Excel worksheet. Messes up the formatting but seems to be the only option atm.

[malbox]

If it helps - how we deal with similar things here is set up simple reports to pull out the various tables we want. Those get run by a scheduled script (using commandreporter) - and then we use either Power Query + Excel or Power BI to produce the summaries (depending on where they're going to / who's using). Downside is it's always out of date info (reports run overnight), but it's worked for us (and will for the next 2 and a bit weeks til we're Bromcom)

[bobsmith]

I feel sorry for you having to come from a modern system to the dinosaur that is SIMS.

 

I've been relying on powerbi to do the heavy lifting for the last 2 years - provided you are happy with data being a few hours out of date then running commandreporter overnight and dumping the data into powerbi then it's a much nicer method than using the inbuilt reports.

[syan]

Our school hasn't implemented Power BI yet as a solution for long-term use, but your methods should suffice when we do get it so thanks! In the meantime I've basically given up on the in-built LM reports and design macro reports instead, but here---and not to derail the thread too much---we have the additional issue of sending the code to Capita for them to digitally sign (as we are on the horrible hosted version). I've been told on one hand that we require an add-on of sorts to do this, and on the other just email it to their service desk for signing. Until we get a concrete answer, we are forced to run the macros manually

[malbox]

I never liked the "embed your macro as the report document" solution, always seemed to throw up quirks and always limited to data from that one report - so just used to set up a workbook outside SIMS with commandreporter pulling the reports out, and then processing, at the start of the script (when reports needed truly live data - eg the way we manage detentions means I have a sheet that pulls three reports out that way that applies various rules before producing the lists, e-mails home + to staff, etc).

 

How/if commandreporter works with hosted, however - not a clue (self-hosted here).

 

If not PowerBI but considering - is worth trying Excel and powerquery (using overnight data dumps) - powerquery should give you a start in learning how to get the data as you'll want it for PowerBI, as well as giving a decent solution.