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TASC put me in touch with the school who had problems. I agree with you that TASC support is great and I was surprised they had difficulties. I am still hopeful that we will get it to work.

Nationwide Trust-E. The sales rep said they work with PARS but one school I have spoken to said they could not get it to work.

We are going to be installing cashless catering from September. As it will 'work' using thumb prints we are wondering of using them as a way of keeping track of our year 12 and 13 pupils. Has anyone tried doing this and been successful?

Would agree with all the other positive comments about PARS. We are using the behavior more and more and will be introducing a 'points mean prizes' system next year using it. The nice thing is that it is all included in the basic product so that we can use all the funds allocated for the prizes.

We currently use SIMS and INSIGHT and are very pleased with INSIGHT. We are ditching our current VLE and replacing it with a combination of setting assignments in INSIGHT and using Ranger or webaccess for file access on the network. Insight is a lot more cost effective for use as a parent\student portal than SLG but does not give staff access to SIMS.

Tasc INSIGHT does display the option choices and allows parents to make and authorize them but not the final allocations at the moment. They are working on it though.

We have used SIMS Options Offer and INSIGHT to collect the majority of our year 9 options choices. It has now been fed back into SIMS Options and all blocks and classes have now been finalized. We would like to let parents know the final results but cannot think of anyway of doing this by email or on INSIGHT. Has anyone done this?

Seems to happen much more now. Every little change seems to require it.

My desktop was replaced over Easter with one running Windows 7 64 bit and Office 2013 64 bit. The only problem I have had so far is with individual reports where the tags appear when I have edited a template. Running a spell check and verifying has cured that. I know it is not supported but see no need to change to 32 bit version for now.

We are thinking of ditching our current VLE as it is not used etc. As we are now giving students Insight accounts we are considering using some of the features. like assignments and documents etc. Has anyone got any ideas. suggestions or experience doing this?

Could not agree more, I know I have made errors transferring and analysing in Excel and try to keep it to the absolute minimum.Captita still have some work to do in this area. As to Excel the latest version does a good job treating text as numbers but if you do not like macros or VBA then you might find this ASAP Utilities for Excel - The essential add-in for Excel users. FREE excel tools and macros to save time. Download Excel tools useful.

Ridiculous! It will take the data manager a second to add either a year group, or better still, a course marksheet with group filter to the template. Go back and ask, if you still get the same reply then complain to their line manager.

As Vik says it is often because they are attached to a specific year related result set but are retaking the year. I make sure that a copy of the individual report has been saved as a linked document and then delete the old grades. It is a bit fiddly though.

John is absolutely correct, just done it here. But make sure you do add the exceptions as he suggests, ie you and the exams officer.

I agree with both Stephen and Edu-It. (Although I do find the grades feedback awkward to configure it does work)

LosOjos, I think I created a new blank NewAspects file by mistake, the original does have the text. Problem is that each aspect is created twice and SIMS does not like that. When I select only one of each to import it does so with lots of warnings. Not really sure that I want to go ahead and use it but await your findings with interest. But I like the idea of bulk creation of templates, can you give more details?

The only way is to do it individually from linked documents. I have had to do this a few times and it does not take as long you would think but it is still a pain.

We don't use profiles either but the way it works here is that the individual reports are uploaded to the document server when they are complete. When we want parents to see them I then run the Insight conversion routine that produces the pdf version of the individual report and that is the only one that the parent can see. The date range in Insight covers the selection that it uses to identify which files to convert, I didn't know/realise that I could set a date range that controlled what they could see.

That bit does not seem to be in the instructions, I will add it and see what happens. Thanks

LosOjos, I have followed the instructions and have a question about the Aspect ID, how do I ensure it is unique? I have also tried to import the NewAspects file and get the message 'file contains invalid data, select different file' Any idea on what I may be doing wrong?

Thanks LosOjos and Vik. I do use the ctrl+c method but find that after a while I start making errors and have to go back and check. The categories are annoying as sometimes they are cloned, eg for aspects, and other times they are not.

I have to rename and then clone around 100 aspects, for example existing aspect is 'Art Skills' and it needs to be renamed 'Art Skills 1' and then cloned and named 'Art Skills 2'. I think that there may be a way that uses an xml editor but cannot remember how to do it. Any advice will be very welcome.

I think that you are almost there and if there is only one result for each exam then you don't need to worry about the date of entry. If there are more results for each exam then I would either use different aspects, eg Maths Y5, Maths Y6 etc or use a result set, eg Year 5, Year 6, together with a single Maths aspect. It will really depend on what you want to do with the data once it is in SIMS.

Neil, sorry about my rather misleading short reply, just read your original post and see that you mentioned result sheets not result sets. LosOjos is right to point you in the direction of the documentation and if there are any courses in your area I would recommend trying to get on one.

The enttry date is what you see at the top of the column and it has no bearing on the result set that is being used. Carry on importing.