DeeGee

In the student details pane, there is button next to the address with a picture of the Earth on it. Clicking on this is supposed to open a Multimap of the address's location. However, multimap's not been around for the best part of two years - it's now part of BING. multimap.co.uk doesn't work at all as a domain name. If you change the domain name in the address bar of the browser window to multimap.com, it redirects correctly to the address on BING. If you change the address from multimap to bing, it doesn't work. Has anyone else noticed this? I have a work around (change .co.uk to .com), but don't want to have to do this every time someone needs a map. If nobody else noticed this, does this mean that this functionality is not needed ;-) ?

It would work as a stop-gap until I get round to fixing the templates, I suppose...

They could, but then others who open the same sheet (curriculum leaders, SLT) would also have to do this when the sheet is opened. More importantly, they'd have to remember to do this. IIRC it doesn't stay forever. If I made a central change to the template, it would go, wouldn't it?

I'm feeling lazy. The staff all need an additional column to be added to their marksheets. It's the column for Free School Meals. The column needs to be visible for all teachers who could access the sheet. Is there any way I can do this without having to edit each template individually? Cheers, D

So, weve been using Sanako Language labs for the best part of 10 years. There are always litle issues, but nothing to cause us too much concern. The new one to crop up recently is related to the teacher. Anything that comes out of the teacher's PC cannot be heard. It records blank, and will not broadcast over either the speakers or the students' headphones. I've reinstalled the sound card drivers, but no dice. Cables haven't been moved. Any ideas?

We're looking to buy about 20 Graphics tablets for our DiDA graphics groups. Some students are using them at the moment, but they're having to bring them and their own laptops in because we don't have drivers installed. To make this easier, we figured getting some would be nice. Now, I know nothing about graphics tablets. I assume they have a driver which needs installing and then work like a mouse, so they are compatible with most graphics software. We use Serif DrawPlus for DiDA, but also have Fireworks and Photoshop is need be. Could someone point me in the direction of a decent, but not too complicated tablet. Our head of ICT suggested that she'd like something A4 sized, but I'd like to propose a decent, but good value A5 sized tablet as well. Does anyone use graphics tablets? What would you recommend?

By "added" do you mean so they have a login an password? Can they not just go in as a default user?

We build an image with it on and then deploy that with WDS to all teaching/admin PCs. It helps us that all teaching PCs are the same specification.

That's why we don't use a new one.

Funnily enough, I do both of those. Belt and braces approach and all that, if anything "escapes" from the binliner.

Just phoned the OfficeXpress line. Very useful. Thanks.

What happens on the 4th of May 2015, then?

Anyone know the most efficinet way of emptying these things, preferable without plumes of dust enveolping Helpdesk...?

Roy Castle fund now have a list of cartridges that they will take. Compatibles are no-go. Does anybody have any other ideas?

I've logged this with the Service desk. I know that there aren't many folk here use the Profiles module, but I thought I'd throw this one out while waiting for the service desk to get back to me. We are having an issue with staff inputting comments within the Profiles module. It appears that if they use Grid Entry to input all the comments for a student, then click next, before clicking Save, once they click Save on the "Do you wish to save your changes" dialog, the comment codes are stripped out of the boxes that they have been input into (except for the final set) - the comments remain in the free text box. In itself, this is not a problem, but the comments are also copying themselves from the first free text box into the botom free text box, so the comments are appearing twice as follows: Introduction TEXT A Commitment TEXT B Achievements TEXT C Improvement Strategies Introduction TEXT A Commitment TEXT B Achievements TEXT C TEXT D Frankly, it's awfully time consuming fixing this. It only seems to affect our ICT faculty - I don't know if they're the only ones who are clicking next before saving - in a school the size of ours I find that difficult to believe. Have you ever seen this sort of thing before?

I've been asked to try and incorporate attendance data in some marksheets for Form Tutors. Obviously I'm able to include Absence % and such, but I'd really like to be able to count, or at least make a note of, if anyone has had a late mark. Anyone done anything like this? Failing that, can I include this sort of data on additional columns within the register sheets themselves?

I'm sorry to say that, yes you are.

We use Sanako purely for delivering media in our language labs, and for the students to collaborate and save work for assessment. We don't use the classroom control stuff, don't have a licence for it. Classroom control in all our computer rooms (dozens of them) is done through Vision, and we've upgraded to the latest version. We're now having issues in the Sanako labs, as Vision works fine, except Demo mode which launches then hangs (we're left with the little 3-2-1 countdown animation). Has anyone else had this problem? has anyone found a fix?

We've had a couple of us look at it and replicated the error elsewhere. Column 1 is Names, Column 2 is numbers based on a lookup, matching the lookup value to the name in column 1. Column 3 is numbers based on a different lookup table, matching the lookup value to the name in column 1. Column 4 Adds the two columns together, multiplies by 6 and divides by 2. Sort on Column 1 - OK Sort on Column 2 - OK Sort on Column 3 - OK Sort on Column 4 - randomness. Copy the values of Column 4 and paste elsewhere - sorts fine. Anyone got a work-around that doesn't require copy/pasting, so I can enter data in one place and have everything update? Thing is, I can think lof many occasions when this would be useful...

OK, this has come back to bite me on the bum. The column that I want to sort contains Finely Differentiated scores calculated using a simple formula bassed on the results of the previous two columns. If I select the whole sheet, then sort on the column I wish to sort, it sorts the column into a random order. If I then undo and sort again, it sorts the column into a totally different order. The results are correct if I look along the row, but I cannot for the life of me get it to sort the set of results in order according to this one specific column. Again, copy the results and paste the values into a new sheet - worksheet works fine. I cannot google anywhere anyone who's had anything similar.

I think I'd like to do that to be honest. Problem is, we renew the comment banks year on year, so there are always at least two for the same subject/year group, eg 2009 (as an archive of the banks that already exist) and 2010, so I know full well that staff will change the wrong one. Do you know, off hand, whether, if you're using bespoke permissions rather than SIMS own permission groups, you can give bog-standard teaching staff access to view the comment banks? Actually, I suppose if they go to the list entry screen, they can see the comments...

We use SIMS .net for profiles. Currently I maintain all the comment banks. For security reasons (ie to stop staff deleting them from SIMS .net), curriculum leaders do not have access to the comment banks module. Therefore, what happens is, at the beginning of the year, I export all the comment banks to be used that academic year, and store them in a shared area to which all staff have read access, and selected staff have write access. During the course of the academic year, the staff charged with the task edit comment banks as necessary, then just before I open the reporting session, I import them all back in. Then the staff actually get reading the comment banks and want to correct the errors! In the past we used a Sharepoint workspace for this. This meant that I could set the system up to send me an e-mail if changes had been made, so I could go back in and reimport comment banks with changes. Staff liked this system and felt that it was automated - it wasn't, there was a SIMS monkey working in the background, but they don't need to know that! However, our Sharepoint licence has expired, so this year I'm storing the comment banks on a shared drive on our network. This system was fine for changes up until the day that I import the banks and open the session, but staff are forgetting to e-mail me with changes after the event. Is there any way I can get notification of a change to contents on a shared drive on a Windows network? Otherwise, what methods do you use? Do you allow staff access to the comment banks module to make changes there? Does that work reasonably well?

This is really useful. Thanks Vik. I'll give it a go...

Aha! Turns out that it wasn't the VLOOKUP that was completely at fault. More my hamfisted construction of the arguments. Only a few columns were faulty, so I thought I'd delve a bit deeper. Turns out that I'd put the name of the worksheet in front of the cell reference of the lookup value, when it was looking for a value on the same cell. Consequently this was seen as invariable and didn't update automagically as the rest of the sheet did when applying the filters. I took the worksheet name off and Robert is now my mother's brother!

Done. Have you looked at the "Is this your intellectual property" bit? It's got your logo on - that's your intellectual property isn't it? That's the route we always use to get a Facebook page taken down!