Hiyawatha

Minehaha has just nipped out to visit the local medicine man. I'll give her your message when she reappears. After what time would you rather not be telephoned ?

Have tried Enter - without success. At the moment so many little things are going wrong, and all very difficult to describe succinctly. The only way to sort them would be for you to see them yourself. I think we'll just have to plough on and do the best we can. Don't want to ruin your afternoon as well ...... Thank you so much.

I'm at present working offline and I would be hesitant to update my programme unilaterally (what about others at my school - and the admin programme?). Can I somehow get out from under the influence of the "Control word" ?, which seems to be preventing me from doing the things I want to and which would be no problem if I was in Word (simply copying, pasting statements etc. between pupils - or even moving statements from one subject to another).

Minnehaha here - first time |I'm aware of the new nickname - not sure it's promotion or demotion But here am I slaving away on Reports during the rain of Half Term-oh joy - and the last issue I raised is the real bugbear - the pronouns not changing when Group Writer sends the statement into the other children of the group. I.m wondering if in fact I will have to do two versions, and select all girls into my group, then repeat with boys - so hopefully the pronouns would be correct form the outset... but I thought the programme would be kind enough to do that for me? Also I have already tried something along those lines, and, - as we said yesterday- the programme seems to want to INSIST on changing it - and we get a hybrid of pronouns in the SAME statement - 'his commendable effort' shortly followed 'she should therefore.....' - all jolly frustrating as it's all taking so long to bachtrack and correct. Any solutions more than gratefully received..All best wishes - we do appreciate the great job you are doing Sarah

A few days into compiling reports with ReportPlus now and 'Er Indoors (Minehaha, if you will) has been coming across one or two problems. Have asked her to explain : 1)Group Writer pasted my Maths statement into Science – even though I had ensured the cursor was in the Numeracy box. Ah, simple, I thought – simply copy and paste into the relevant box. BUT NO…- When trying to copy and paste statements from one subject to another or one pupil to another, we are stopped by message that says " You cannot add text to that position as it is the middle of a control word! I have a feeling that the Control words may be gender based – esp pronouns, and so knocked that particular word off the start of the text I was copying, hoping to beat the system – but to no avail. 2) On completing my Group writer statement, I have been disappointed to see that when arriving in a child’s individual report the pronouns have not changed to the appropriate male /female version. Indeed , this has also been the case when copying and pasting statements when in Group, the pronouns either do not change from, say, "his" to "hers", him to her, himself to herself etc; or they do a half-change from "his" to "hiers" or "heis". This is taking me ages to rectify, - it’s a slow and painful process which looms ahead in ten subject areas, and for the full 30 childrens’ reports. Not a nice prospect. If you can help save my sanity I would be very grateful!

My little personal problems with reports pale into insignificance ........ Let's hope the new regime will improve things and we find that we have emerged, blinking, into the broad, sunlit uplands next year.

Anthony, I have a confession - I am not the teacher in this household, tis 'er indoors wot is being driven slowly demented by what education is becoming these days - ticks, targets and endless bits of paper. Simply so that we can keep our heads above water, I try to supply a bit of back-up where I can. I found your website by accident - a happy accident - and it has proved invaluable in getting to grips with ReportPlus, which was handed to the school staff with no introduction, no training and no warning. "Just get on with it yourselves" they were told. So, if you're under 30 or computer friendly, you survive - if not, you have hours added to an already full workload and doing stuff of no educational benefit to the children whatsoever. It must be going on all over the country but, unlike the French, we just put up with it. Thanks to you, I think we might be seeing the light at the end of the reports tunnel for this year. By next year, of course, Michael Gove will have changed everything once again - but by then we may have imploded .....................

To ComputingData: Your tip was extremely useful. I'm not sure I understood it completely and haven't found a way of dragging stuff around effectively yet, but I took up your idea of the tree within the statements area and found that I could simply add in the statements I wanted (my own as well), including Headings of each different subject with their own list of individual personal comments. Many thanks for saving me hours of stress. Not very good at working out how the Edugeek website works yet, but would like to record THANKS in large bold colour ....... Hiyawatha

C/D, Many thanks - I'll try that and let u know .....

ComputingData or laserblazer: I have started to get into ReportPlus. Am trying to set up a bank of my own favourite statements in each of the different subjects. So far I have been able to write in a bunch of statements, but they transfer themselves on each move to a different subject. Is there a way to open a new list for each different subject please ?

Many thanks to laserblazer and to ComputingData. I tried "domino" with instant success to enter the old files. Saved me a lot of time asking around the office etc. V. grateful.

Been away from Report Assist for three years, but would like to get back in to reports I saved at the time. In view of your last paragraph, ComputingData, is there a way of being reminded of a password, which I have forgotten ? People have changed at my school, so there may be noone there who remembers. Would a password have been logged anywhere else other than at my school ?