LosOjos

I've just been accepted to the beta so will be getting my domain trusted over the weekend

There's your problem - 4 subreports, 3 of which are based on Assessment - that is never going to be a quick report! just re-read; 10 more based on assessment! 2 hours sounds pretty quick to be honest! It's a bit more manipulation on your part I know, but the way I'd tackle that would be to make one report which has an Assessment subreport; that subreport will return all the assessment data that you need, plus the aspect name. Then I'd have a second report that returns your classes data. In both reports, add a 'Person_id' column (you need to be in the Third Party Reporting permissions group for that) - now you have a guaranteed unique ID to tie the two reports together in Excel. With your assessment report, create a pivot table that has all your student columns as rows and your aspect name as columns - this will give you the layout you currently have. Copy/Paste values so you can manipulate further. Now add a column for your class. Finally, use INDEX/MATCH (or VLOOKUP if you prefer) to pull in the assessment data and class name from your two original reports in to your new table. As I said, it does mean you probably need to spend 10 minutes manipulating the data to get the format you want (probably longer until you get the hang of it), but SIMS will produce the data much more quickly resulting in a net gain in time spent EDIT: also, please do take @PhilNeal's advice and log a case, as there may be a technical issue Capita can help you with (in case you didn't realise, Phil is a good person to listen to where SIMS is concerned )

OK, using those reports, the big thing to be careful with is subreports (the 'related' items in the report designer). The more subreports you use, the slower your report will get. Makes sense as (I assume) you're asking SIMS to perform a join on multiple tables. Nesting a subreport within a subreport seems to exponentially increase the time the report will take to run also. If you need to filter based on data in a subreport, make sure you do so on the subreport itself. I'm talking about clicking the 'related item' in the right hand side of report designer, then using the 'define settings' window to set your filters. I've seen people make the mistake of adding a subreport (say, 'Classes' to a 'Student' report), then using the reports 'Filter Students' screen to filter the 'Classes' which makes things much slower. Thinking about this from a technical standpoint, I assume what's happening is SIMS is essentially performing the same join twice, once to gather all the matching data from 'Classes', then again to remove entries that don't match the filter. Adding the filters to the subreport itself would (theoretically, I don't really know what SIMS is doing 'under the hood'!) mean SIMS can form a SQL query to filter out irrelevant entries in the first join, saving a lot of time. I'm not great with words, so here are a couple of screenshots to demonstrate what I mean. The first screenshot is how you should filter a subreport, the second is one to avoid (unless you only need to filter on the subreport's values and don't actually need to retrieve those values; that way you're still only performing the join once): Both methods achieve the same outcome, but the first is much quicker. The other big problem causing slowdown is simply volume of data. Make sure your reports are only pulling the data you need. If they're still slow, can you possibly break it down and make multiple runs? OK, it means more work for you but it can really bring the run time down and stop SIMS crawling for everyone else in school on particularly large reports. For instance, if you're pulling assessment data from SIMS, are you filtering it to only retrieve the aspects you want? Could you run it a year group or even a reg group at a time? There may well be some technical issue that Capita can sort for you, but these are some things you can always keep an eye on to get your reports moving as quickly as possible.

Struggling to find any info on the software you're basing this on, do you have a link?

No, but if you install something like Bullzip PDF, then you can "print" to a normal PDF, which when opened will allow you to set whatever print settings/range you like. Not ideal, but works.

You can't nest '[NESTED] IF' columns unfortunately What are you trying to achieve? There are lots of us here who have taken on SIMS from all sorts of angles, we might be able to think of another approach that will work

First off, are we talking Reporting Engine (Reports > Run Report) or Individual Reports (Focus > Assessment > Individual Report)? There are a few 'gotchas' with both that can help speed things up a lot, but they're very different kettles of fish...

You can design reports to export almost all of the data SIMS holds, but not the data types. SQL will of course* hold the relevant data types, but the SIMS SQL DB is hugely complex and you'd be ill advised to mess with it. What are you trying to achieve? * at least, you'd certainly hope so! EDIT: actually it's just occurred to me that if you set the output type to XML, you get the schema which would contain the data types. Then it's up to you to transform the XML to fit your needs. EDIT 2: the challenge intrigued me... this is only a very basic example, but hopefully will get you started if you want to churn through some XML. This will only work with basic reports (i.e. no subreports) and will format weirdly for missing elements (it doesn't do any kind of checking of nodes, just creates a table from the schema then assumes all nodes are present, which they'll almost certainly not be ) but it was fun having a play with some XSL. Apply this XSL to an XML SIMS report, then open the XML in IE (Chrome/FF will block it) and you should have a formatted HTML table of all the data it contains plus the data type (as stated by the schema): <br /> html {<br /> font-family: sans-serif;<br /> -ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;<br /> -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;<br /> }<br /> <br /> table {<br /> margin:0px;<br /> padding:0px;<br /> width:100%;<br /> border:1px solid #000;<br /> border-collapse: collapse;<br /> }<br /> <br /> table td {<br /> border: 1px solid #000;<br /> }<br /> <br /> table thead {<br /> color: #fff;<br /> font-weight: bold;<br /> background: #005fbf;<br /> }<br /> <br /> []

Really looking forward to this

Was it Warzone 2100? Don't remember the specifics (such as race selection), but remember it being a really good fun Sci-Fi RTS that was a bit dark/industrial as you describe. I played it on PS1 (I think, may have been PC though), really cool to see it open sourced and online now

haha, no but I can see why you'd think that - it's actually Keegan-Michael Key (Key & Peele) at the recent[ish] Obama dinner 'sketch' Obama Brings the White House Down With CNN, MSNBC Digs, Surprise 'Key & Peele' 'Anger Translator' at Correspondents' Dinner (Video)

I've just nipped in to the future (as you do) and found this rare photo taken tomorrow of our two favourite salesmen:

Awesome idea, voted and tweeted a link (I volunteer in the local youth coding community so hopefully there'll be a few of my followers interested in this too!)

Questions for Insight and Go4Schools users: - do your SIMS marksheet link up? (i.e. can teachers enter data in to SIMS marksheets online?) - can parents reset their own passwords via the website? We're currently using SLG but the simple fact that parents can't reset their own passwords is making it an administrative nightmare. However, our teachers do use the marksheet entry part of SLG a lot so we don't really want to lose that functionality.

How about best/funniest photoshop of one another in 3 minutes?

As it's a special occasion, I've made this monstrosity for today's winner:

Which one of those rifts do I win in? Congrats to this time line's winner!

https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/19/lets-encrypt-is-trusted.html

OK does that mean it's my turn? I'm varying it up a little, who has @VeryPC_Colin_M traded places with in this photo?

Hanson http://365daysinmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Hanson971.jpg

I did... you didn't say I couldn't!

It's him:

It's a rick roll.

Not a game you can really "complete" (though I'm working on the trophies) but I've been utterly obsessed with Rocket League lately. Just one more go!

I watched The Wolverine over the weekend. Very disappointing TBH.