Primary School Reports

[talksr]

Hello,

 

Every year, we seem to have issues with staff being able to write reports.

 

The school wish for staff to fill in a template document with all of the details for each pupil:

Name, grades etc and then some text boxes where staff are able to enter in specific info about the pupil in question.

 

The reason for this is that every report looks identical, has the same number of pages etc.

 

In the past this has been done in a locked Word Document and also a PDF however staff have reported issues when opening on certain devices such as Chromebooks as well as issues whereby the text they insert into the text boxes is not highlighted red if there are spelling errors, so they are making mistakes and saving the report without realising.

 

 

I had thought about creating a Google Form for staff to input necessary data for each pupil, but then there is no backend solution that I am aware of which would take the data and put it into a template Word document.

What soloutions do other schools use for this? The school has ScholarPack for the MIS which doesn't appear to offer a service to help with this, just wondering how others deal with this.

[simpsonj]

We've always used the inbuilt functionality in our MIS (SIMS then Bromcom) for report writing.

 

However, if you did create a Google Form, presumable all the 'results' would be stored into a spreadsheet? Could this not be then used in a mail merge into Word to create the desired result?

[talksr]

We've always used the inbuilt functionality in our MIS (SIMS then Bromcom) for report writing.

 

However, if you did create a Google Form, presumable all the 'results' would be stored into a spreadsheet? Could this not be then used in a mail merge into Word to create the desired result?

 

Yes I understand schools with SIMS seem to have a function for this. I understand that the school will be moving from ScholarPack to Abor, so I wonder if the Abor solution may have something.

 

I will look into the mailmerge suggestion, thanks for that.

Do you think this would be something that staff in the classroom or office would be able to easily do? I have never done one myself before, so had not thooght about that!

[hemistry7]

Have used this in my previous school: https://reportcomplete.com/ worked really well. Predefined templates for each key stage would be created beforehand, teaching staff would then populate the templates then export to PDF when finished.

[dhicks]

I had thought about creating a Google Form for staff to input necessary data for each pupil, but then there is no backend solution that I am aware of which would take the data and put it into a template Word document.

 

As suggested above, a basic mailmerge should be all you need. I vaguely thought Google had now added mailmerge functionality into Google Docs, but a quick search suggests you still have to install an add-on or implement your own solution. This add-on seems to be the top search result:

 

https://mailmergedocs.com

 

The other top search result suggests writing some simple mailmerge functionality yourself using Google's API. I've recently done that for another project, so do say if you want a hand implementing that.

 

The school has ScholarPack for the MIS which doesn't appear to offer a service to help with this

 

Is it maybe an add-on module or similar? It's a fairly common feature for a MIS.

[simpsonj]

Alternatively, you could install Libre Office or Open Office (presuming you're using a Windows PC) and that should be able to do Mail Merges.

[dhicks]

Alternatively, you could install Libre Office or Open Office (presuming you're using a Windows PC) and that should be able to do Mail Merges.

 

If you want to do Mailmerge from a script / command line tool, then I have some (somewhat rough) Python code here:

 

https://github.com/dhicks6345789/docx-merge

 

The DOCX format is actually a ZIP file, with the text content available in XML format inside the archive, so Mailmerge becomes a case of a pretty simple text search-and-replace operation.

 

Just had a look at the code I wrote a few weeks ago implementing the mailmerge-via-API method, and it seems that "testing" OAuth refresh tokens now expire after a week, so I need to go and have a look at how to sort that.