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Looking at the "screenshots" on this Arbor page, I'm wondering if TimeTabler might be about to get a facelift which might make it more appealing to some users: https://arbor-education.com/timetabler/

> but actually excel in that case converts the negative symbol into an equals and I can't seem to stop it. Can you force a "-" symbol by doing something like =IF(A1<0, "-"&ABS(A1), A1) (A1 just being a sample cell for this example)

You might be thinking of timetabler.com which is a rival package to Nova by Keith Johnson. Nevertheless, the curriculum diagrams are very interesting all the same and Keith Johnson's book has lots of discussion of curriculum models. -Andy

Hi, we have a similar situation although we ditched the part where Triple Science students have additional lessons in an option block. However, I think the same applies: we have a block where most classes are down as Sc6 but the Triple classes are down as Bi2-Ch2-Ph2 - see the image from Nova attached. This means that your Triple classes can have separate Chemistry, Physics and Biology reports with the correct teacher name on them. -Andy

This was the impression I got when evaluating Arbor and was the one thing that stopped me from recommending it to our SLT. Their new "external report card" feature (where you can upload a PDF per student e.g. one that you have mailmerged) seems like a reasonable workaround for now. I got an extended demo from both Arbor and Bromcom at BETT and Bromcom seems far ahead in this respect - it seems that it can replicate all of the functionality of SIMS' Individual Reports and that setting up marksheets is easier than on SIMS (i.e. you don't need to clone a template for each subject).

I've been alerted to some good news on this front: Arbor has added a facility to bulk upload externally generated reports (as long as the filenames are identifiable e.g. contain the student number or UPN). This means that reports could be mailmerged outside of Arbor and then distributed via Arbor. More details here: https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404406648349-Import-and-send-out-External-Report-Cards#how-to-import-your-external-report-cards-0-1 It's not quite the same as SIMS "Individual Reports" + calculated marksheet columns but it could be more flexible in certain circumstances. -Andy

Also another +1 for Edulink. Teachers here love it. And I always get a very swift response whenever I email their support team. Andy

One workaround might be to do what we do: rather than printing them, we export them (as PDF) to a folder. We then use the free PDFSAM Basic to merge them into a single PDF which can then be printed or shared electronically.

Thanks for that, RichP - that's really helpful. I am concerned about the seemingly rigid format of the Report Cards but it's hard to know all the ins and outs before having a live system to play with. In particular, it looks like we wouldn't have much control over the placement of marks entered as "Ad Hoc" assessments. Does that work well with assessment data and not just basic facts about a student e.g. names, form, attendance figures? I couldn't tell if we could put the merge fields into tables or whether it is essentially just straight text. I think this is probably the only way to get some of the functionality of SIMS' Individual Reports. But how would we share the output with parents? Would we have to print them out and put them in an envelope? I don't think we could attach them all to separate emails in some bulk way, could we? Thanks so much - I think I'm getting closer to understanding how Arbor works with all this! Andy

Thank you for this tip - this could be very helpful! Looking at the Salamander website, though, I can only see a tool for exporting Photos not Linked Documents. Or is it part of School Data Sync (but it seems that that only produces CSVs).

Hi, thank you for all the replies. It does seem like Bromcom is more advanced in this respect e.g. by allowing calculated columns in marksheets. The live-feed in Arbor does look convenient and may give me the flexibility to create reports outside of Arbor. My only concern, then, is how to distribute and documents that I produce. Andy

Hi all, we are currently investigating moving MIS and Arbor seems good on many counts. But I have some concerns about the functionality of the "Report Cards" and marksheets generally. Currently we use Individual Reports on SIMS to create termly reports to send to parents. Some of this data may come from calculated columns in marksheets (which I gather are not available in Arbor but I think I can live without that). My concern is that the format that data is presented on Arbor's report cards is rather restricted and not as customisable as on SIMS Individual Reports where I can modify the Word-based template to my own requirements. Does anyone here have experience of Arbor report cards and can give me their opinion on this? One option would be to export report data from Arbor and then create individual student PDFs using Excel or Python (or something). But I then can't see how I could distribute these via Arbor. I'd be grateful for any advice! I haven't looked at Bromcom as much but it seems that their reports might be more closely modelled on SIMS' marksheets + Individual Reports and hence more flexible than Arbor at the present time. Thanks, Andy

We have found that by saving the marksheet, closing it, then re-opening it in EduLink that the calculated columns appear correctly. I haven't experimented too much but it may require "calculate on save" to be ticked on the marksheet template.

I know the SIMS 'jump' when clicking on a button is a long-known issue here... I usually manage to cope with it but it's causing me particular annoyance now that a "Groups" button has been added below "Students" on the Individual Reports page. Whenever I click "students" the jump causes "groups" to be clicked instead (which I then cancel and click the right button again). Does anyone know how to solve this? I remember a thread a while back where it was implied that no-one at Capita had ever seen the problem or was able to reproduce it and there was a suggestion that it might be to do with screen resolutions or something. Has anyone ever managed to find a fix?! Thanks in anticipation! Andy

It's definitely all in the verifying! In fact, you don't even need to specifically verify the document: just click the red cross in the top-right of the window and select "yes" when it asks if you want to save (the Verify macro gets automatically called when the window is killed). This is what I now do when I have a non-working template and it seems to work every time: open the Word template make a small change e.g. inserting a space and then deleting it (this is just to trick Word into thinking that a change has been made) DO NOT SAVE THE DOCUMENT! Instead, click the red cross (top-right) to close the window and then select "Yes" when you are asked if you want to save your changes. There is one other thing that seems to make a big difference: in a table, select the whole table and right-click and select Table Properties / Row and make sure that there is no tick against Allow Rows To Break Across Pages. Andy

Sorry, this isn't an MIS question but its something that's come up in my role as data manager and I was hoping some forum users might have some knowledge on the topic! I've been going through the tables checking website and checking with our results and there's something I'm confused about regarding a DiDA diploma we offer DiDA (seeing as we are almost exclusively offering GCSEs, I don't have much experience in this area). The issue is: according to Edexcel's website and a few other places, a distinction at level 1 DiDA is equivalent to a C. However, when I look on the Ofqual register, it says it's only worth 34 points rather than the 40 I would expect. Does anyone know the reason for this apparent discrepancy? I'm afraid I'm all a bit new to this topic, so apologies if I sound a bit confused - any help would be greatly appreciated! Andy

We use Individual Reports where each subject enters effort/behaviour/level etc. on a marksheet and then the form tutor provides a summarising comment in a "comment" aspect. This seems to work fine as the form tutor's comment is less than the 1000 character limit of a comment aspect. There are a few catches: to avoid mishaps until they are used to the system, I encourage form tutors to write their comments in Word and then cut and paste into the marksheet. However, if they haven't "expanded" the comment cell then only the first paragraph is correctly pasted across. Also, you can't right-click to paste so I need to teach them the ctrl+v shortcut! This year we have started getting A level teachers to write UCAS references via SIMS: however, it was clear that the 1000 word limit was going to be a problem so I have opted to use "Profiles" instead. These seem to be considerably more trouble to set up initially although teachers don't seem to be having trouble entering their references. I'll see how it all pans out but I think I'd much prefer to use templates and comment aspects with Individual Reports wherever possible rather than Profiles.

Thank you for the suggestions.... I think we'll go with the easiest option: telling people not to get too anxious about future anything more than a day or two ahead!!

Hi, With timeline on the new SIMS homepage, teachers seem to have suddenly discovered how to look into the future and see what cover they have coming up. This is causing our Cover Manager more grief than is necessary as teachers are asking a lot of questions about cover arrangements which are only tentative the moment! I don't know much about how Cover works in SIMS but we were wondering if it was possible to avoid cover appearing in the timeline until it was "confirmed" in some way? I suspect the answer is 'no' and we'll have to resort to putting up a notice dissuading teachers from looking into the future with the timeline but would appreciate any suggestions or thoughts. Thanks in advance!