[sims] Attendance Letter generation

[Little-Miss]

When the office manager tries to print letters for kids with attendance under 90% say, she gets a massive list of kids (some of them have certain circumstances so we know why etc) So for this example i did year 6 with less then 90 and got 45 kids. Then there is what appears to be the option to select the children you want to generate the letters for but even when she does that she still gets a letter created for every child on that list. Are we missing something?!

[vikpaw]

Morning @Little-Miss

The report will just run off the mailmerge based on your template for whatever criteria you have put in. You can print this off selectively.

The next screen with a checkbox appears but that's for use after you've processed the letters in Word. Word should really pop-up, over that screen.

The purpose is that you can upload a copy of the letters to the DocStore for the selected kids. So you want to upload only those that you really sent out, if you want a record that is, and manually select which pages to print out.

 

Hope that makes sense.

[Sivadam]

As with any SIMS Mailmerge Report, running this Report produces different windows.

1) the whole report

2) the template

3) (in this case) the choice of uploading the document to the pupils' linked documents

The whole report is exactly what it says - it is a letter to all the selected pupils. If you go to the template you can actually select the recipients, from the original choice, that you want to send the letter to. Once selected you can just print these or merge them to the original letter, via the Finish and Merge Icon. Once printed you can then choose which to upload to the DMS.

You can also save the letters from the whole report to a different destination, should you need to do so. You should not save or edit the Template from this view - just close it! The Template should be edited via Tools, Setups, Attendance Setup, Letter Definition.

You can follow this 'selection of recipients' routine from ANY Mailmerge report on the system, whether devised by CES or by members in the school! In the 'rpt def' you will probably already have filters (e.g. for Reg Group). This extra functionality in the Report Template enables you to select from the list of pupils that have been produced via the report filter.

For ordinary mail-merge reports, you will not automatically get the upload to DMS screen and the Templates are obviously accessed via Reports, Design Report.

Please be careful if you follow this procedure that you do NOT save any of the Templates!

 

Using the method I have described, you can select the exact 45 pupils that you require, from you original list of 90!

 

Ain't SIMS Wonderful?

Edited March 15, 2012 by Sivadam

[Little-Miss]

Aaah!

 

We understand now.

 

See SIMS isnt really used to its full potential here at the moment (electronic registration hasnt been running that long for us!) so bit by bit we're learning.

 

Thanks guys!

[Sivadam]

There are many that do not realise that the functionality of using the Template to select recipients is available. On many, many occasions I have had to explain this to people who moan that the Template appears as well as the whole report!

They are usually amazed when I tell them about this routine!

 

There are many, many schools that do not use SIMS to it's full capacity. Maybe there is no school that does. We think we are pretty good (and have the SIMS Partnership School award to prove it!) but I know there are areas we should improve on!

 

Unfortunately, when I first started posting on here, there were many users who did not understand the software and how to use it and attacked SIMS itself, when the real reason for their frustration was that they did not understand it! Thankfully that has died down a lot now - but I did make myself very unpopular in my crusade to contradict the many unwarranted threads that used to appear.

 

I still prefer to offer my help via SupportNet but I will continue to try and do so here as well!

Edited March 15, 2012 by Sivadam