[sims] List students with siblings per address

[bladedanny]

Hi All,

 

I'm wanting to produce a report to use in a mail merge. I need to produce a letter that lists all student names at one address.

 

I'm sure it's easy done I just can't see how and my brain isn't working today.

 

Is there a way to produce this out of SIMS or would it be easier to go into excel and do additional stuff in there?

 

Thanks,

 

Dan

[LosOjos]

Is there a way to produce this out of SIMS or would it be easier to go into excel and do additional stuff in there?

 

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a simple way of doing this in SIMS.

 

Easiest way would be to dump all the data you need in to Excel, then pivot on the address.

 

You might want to run the address matching & merging routine in SIMS first though (do it when nobody is using SIMS, it'll slow it down A LOT!)

[creese]

A report based on 'Contacts' with a sub report of 'Student Details - Forename and Surname' would give you the list.

 

I'm not clear how you then want to use this in a Mail Merge but using RTF would most likely do the job.

[bladedanny]

Hi All,

 

We have a Home/School agreement that parents need to sign but we only want to send one per household and have the students' names listed.

 

Hope that sheds more light onto it. I'm going to have a play around with these suggestions to see what I can manage.

 

Thanks,

 

Dan

[LosOjos]

Hi All,

 

We have a Home/School agreement that parents need to sign but we only want to send one per household and have the students' names listed.

 

Hope that sheds more light onto it. I'm going to have a play around with these suggestions to see what I can manage.

 

Thanks,

 

Dan

 

Using either my own or creese's suggested methods to get the data from SIMS, you could create an Excel file which can then be imported in to Access and then set up your letter in there...

[iansimpson888]

Hi,

 

Create a student on roll report with a sub report of family links (sibling name,etc)

Filter the student on roll by students with mailing point = true.

May need to make sure your sims housekeeping to set mailing point to youngest or oldest child has been done this academic year.

 

Thanks.

[bladedanny]

Thanks all,

 

Looking at the results I'm getting out of SIMS we need to do some tidying up before this is going to be possible. I've ran out of time to play with this today but when I do figure it out I'll post up here.

 

Thanks again,

 

Dan

[vikpaw]

I do it as @iansimpson888 described. In fact just doing it for data collection sheets.

The bulk set mailing point is simple enough to run, then you just need to adjust for twins, or ignore it if there aren't many.

Assuming the addresses in the system are accurate, and all the sibling links work, and you get the little houses by each parent to show the address is exactly the same, it's all gravy.

 

EDIT: oh, and i use RTF too, it does the job well, just page break each letter, and put all the fields in that you'll need like salutation etc.

Just remember that each time you edit the template you have to reset page orientation, paper type, margins etc.

Haven't tried Mailmerge direct from SIMs yet on my new Office 2010 box.

Edited November 2, 2011 by vikpaw
Additional note

[coolhands]

A few years late! but in case this helps someone searching in the future as I was, I made a report to check for siblings, when checking FSM eligibility. ie to see if a pupil has siblings so we don't contact the parents on separate occasions (to check for FSM eligibility) without realising we had already contacted them. It's still not perfect; a) if more than one sibling each extra sibling name will be on new row b) you should run it twice, once for priority 1 parent and once again for priority 2 - will then need to combine your two outputs. Or modify further to suit; anyway, I think it helps. After you download file rename file extension zip to RptDef (ignore warning) so you can import to your SIMS.

Sibling check FSM elegibility.zip