DeeGee

I've been working on a huge spreadsheet in Excel to help our Principal work out the setting and banding for Year 7. It's a series of marksheets and timetable and other data which I've exported from SIMS .net, and pasted into a number of sheets on an Excel workbook (having converted all the text to number, natch). Because some of the data was live, because SIMS .net doesn't populate assessment marksheets with our timetable and because I needed to present the front sheet in a specific order, I didn't want to create a single marksheet within SIMS to pull off the rest of the data, so the front page, which I've presented to the Principal, is basically a series of lookups from each of these other sheets with the odd column running calculations for good measure- eg FSM, SEN, Band, Maths Class, KS2 Result, Exam Result, Difference between KS2 and Exam, English Class... Each of the "marksheets" has been exported unformatted and in alphabetical order of surname. I've ensured that the name is formatted identically on each sheet. So far, so good, and when the front page is sorted alphabetically by the first column - name, everything is Hunky Dory, the results are next to the correct names and everything. However, if I try to sort by any other column (ie changing the order of names on the front sheet from those on the Lookup arrays), then the results in all the subsequent columns do not sort correctly. I've worked around the problem by copying the sheet with the lookups and pasting to another blank sheet values only, but I'm hoping that I can make the system a bit more automated and avoid having to do this. Does anyone know what I have to do to make these values sort correctly?

LosOjos: I've had a little look, and it was a huge png file. For some reason I can't put a vector version into Word, so I've deleted the whole thing and used a text logo for the time being. Graphic logos have been causing reports on the other site to be very slow generating as well, so I'll have a look at both of them. Vikpaw: Thanks, I'll look at permissions...

Pulling the JPG out has now made the report generate. This is a blessing, I suppose, although I can't understand why it works fine with a jpg on one site but not another!

Escalation team are remoting in having a look now. Of course, I can't get the error to recur! Tags are valid - I've re-entered them. Even the reports I'm building from scratch aren't working...

Cheers, I'll e-mail Phil with the background to this. I'm sure the template's fine - it was originally exported from another establishment, but has been rebuilt three times now. I've been doing these things for a few years now. SIMS support have seen the template, with our data and doc storage and it runs fine. I've run the equivalent on the parent site, processing three times the amount of data, on a virtual machine with no difficulty...

LosOjos - manual clone - not worked. In fact, manual clone won't even preview! Unfortunately I don't have remote access to the server to try that - it's on a different site! I thought it might be the remote access that was causing the problem intially, which is why I've run it on a physical machine to see if it resolved the problem.

No invalid tags found...

Cheers LosOjos, I can't remember if I've done "Verify Template" or not. I'll do that now. Cloning's an interesting one. I've tried the normal clone, and that if anything is more unstable. I'll have a go at a manual clone next as well...

Does anyone have any ideas? We've set up a new SIMS installation at a school with whch we're federated, and I'm trying to set up individual reports containing assessment data. The reports sometimes preview correctly, but never print, export or upload. More than 50% of the time they don't preview either. What happens is the progress bar comes up, displays "generating", then as the generation finishes and it's about to preview/print/export, I get a windows Error message "Sims.net has encountered an error and has had to close..." I've worked through the relevant checklists regarding tables and security settings and random number and all that, and I've tried to generate on three different versions of Word. I'm currently using Office 2003, and that's the only office suite that's installed. It's been most stable this way. It's a VM ware machine running Windows XP, but I've tried it on a physical machine and found the same difficulty. I've been working on this for three months now, I've missed at least two deadlines, and I'm still no nearer a solution. I could produce a mail merge with results exported from SIMS into excel and then merged into Word, but that's not going to be the best way to have the most up-to-date results and that won't upload to Linked Documents. I'm seriously struggling with this. I've been doing exactly the same thing at my usual school for the best part of four years without so much as a sniff of trouble, I just can't see what's going wrong. I maintain that the problem lies with our SIMS install, but I can't get Capita to admit to anything. Anyone ever come up against anything like this before?