CaterinaAnna

I have a member of support staff who I want to assign to "classes" in T6 (they're extraction groups, mostly in alternative curriculum) but I know that if they are not a "teacher" in SIMS then the SQL import will fail. The T6 handbook is unhelpful, saying merely that they must be "marked as a teacher" but not where. Is it sufficient for them to have the Role of Teacher in Manage Classroom Staff/Roles or must they be marked as Teaching Staff in Employee Details/Employment Details? The former I am allowed to fix, the latter I am not so, if it is the latter, a supplementary question - any ideas for how to get round it and have this non-teacher show on the student timetables? Thanks

I think it came in when T4 was being phased out: I know the people that do use it here are those who would have used Nova for printing class lists in the past. Since I'd already 'done' reporting training by then, and seldom needed individual class lists, no-one showed me and I didn't play. I expect that Capita's response to a request for more choices will be that they're all available in Discover: bad luck for those of us who prefer tables to fancy charts (or have clunky machines). Cynical? Me? never.

Thank you: that's a lot better! Not exactly what I want of course - the data for each student is spread across three rows in excel, but I can fix that. I've never used Student Lists, so didn't realise they were this flexible. In fact, I'm not sure any of my colleagues use it for more than printing off the default lists ...

Bother! I was afraid that would be the case. Looks like it's macro-writing time.

Would love to have a closer look - at the moment I end up pulling the volatile stuff from SIMs and manually lining it up with the historic data in excel ... However, I would need some guidance because the phrase 'command reporter' is rather scary looking.

It's not selecting the students that's the problem, it's getting the output spreadsheet style: periods along the top and a row for each pupil (or vice versa).

Is there a way of producing a selection timetable for a mis-matched set of students in SIMs? I can't find anyone asking the question here or on Support Net, so I'm beginning to woonder if it's obvious and I'm just being thick/blind. Or am I the only one who wants to see where Fred and Jas and Gina are throughout the week? Thanks in advance for any suggestions. Catherine

Quite true, but those notes need to be carried between the bank and home. A friend of mine took out this very amount a few weeks ago to pay for a new car in a private sale. His bank refused to carry out the transaction in private, so everyone who happened to be in the open-plan branch saw and heard the cash being counted out. In spite of being six foot four and built like the proverbial outhouse he was somewhat nervous until he had passed the money on ... (I kept my thoughts on the probable reliability of people who were prepared to neither accept a cheque nor pass over bank details to myself.)

Thanks for letting me know they've tried, and I'm sure it wasn't all your fault! Looks like I'm going to have to rely on the timetabler for a while longer ... (I did find how to alter the layout - see edit)

Not entirely, because I can't get to a year group timetable for export, in spite of many promises that the full functionality would be retained. (And don't tell me I can in T6 - only one person in the entire school has access to that.) And it's picking up the full rather than short room name on individual student timetables - these are way too long to display properly, and I can't make each box three lines long so I can put it on a line by itself ... Moan over, off now to give feedback/seek advice in the appropriate place. ETA layout issues sorted when I played again - got an error message & crash last time, but not this time.

Clip on ties! Oh dear gentlemen, your standards are slipping! I always did up my school tie with a half-Windsor (then switched to velvet ribbon for sub-fusc, so much more feminine). When it comes to undoing them, nothing beats a bow tie, atop a dress shirt and under a DJ ...

Thanks LO, I'm about to run off for the weekend, but I'll give it a try nextweek and let you know how I get on.

Two weeks to go here ... and then only five weeks!

Surely Number 1 should be, 'sgn up to edugeek.net'

Basically I'd like to to pick up the nth to the (n+x)th characters in a document and have them replace LTrim$(Str$(Counter))in this line of a macro: DocName = "Myletter" & LTrim$(Str$(Counter)) Problem is, as someone who has only used VBA in Excel before - & is something of a novice there - I don't know the syntax or how to find out the character number of a particular bit of text. (Well, I could probably have a go at guessing the latter, but is a return a single character? or none? or 80?) And Word's own VBA help files & articles - on & offline - are still above my head. Why? I've a mail merge to generate a set of reports that should be uploaded to our Parent Information System (we use MCAS). To do that I need each student's page to be saved as a separate document when I run the merge. I've found a bit of code that does that, & even got it to work (more or less), but it saves each document with a title in the form "My Letterx" where x is , as you can see from the code, a counter. Now that's a step along the way, but I want the admin number or something so that I don't have to go through and manually rename each one before I upload it to the Bromcom DMS. The number is, of course, in the data source (a separate spreadsheet) and I'm hoping that if I insert it into the document right at the start as a merge field a solution along the lines of what I've asked for above would do the trick. Or would it just pick up the field reference?? Or is there a way of picking it up directly from the data source? I know that if we had all our assessment data in Bromcom or AM this could be done automagically, but ... *sigh* don't ask! Thanks in advance for any light anyone can shed on this.

Me and my big mouth! (Or rather fat fingers)

I've got something I'd like to do a similar job for, so I'll maybe give it a go over half term. No promisies mind ...

Don't know if my experience is typical but we have not used AM so far because: - the last person who came close to understanding it was trained on an ancient version, reckoned (correctly at the time) that they could do much better using Excel, hasn't looked at it since and just happens to be in charge of these things; - most teachers had no access to SIMS until last week since until then the firewall between our admin network and curriculum network was inviolate (and I don't mean painted purple); - there's a stack of background and historical data to be imported if we're to make the best use of it; - we got sidetracked for a while with e-markbook: great for teachers, hopeless for anyone wanting to work at the back end (sorry Kozan et al) - and anyway I'm pretty comfortable doing it in Excel myself ;o) I'm also pretty glad we didn't try using it too soon as it's only over the last year or so that we feel we're collecting only what we need, when we need it, in the most useful form so time could have been wasting setting up sets for data we never want to use again. However a database is far better than a collection of spreadsheets and I see no point in designing one of my own when AM7's sitting there to use. So, once I'm certain SIMS is going to remain the school and LEA MIS of choice, then it'll be worth setting up all those aspects and result sets and using PA to get at least some of the pretty pictures and complicated tables made.

How many sheets is one allowed in an Excel Workbook these days? I ask because I can think of how to code the production (not saying I can do it mind), but it could get very messy ...

I'd a feeling you'd say that!

Probably should have snipped more: I was really responding to the part 'Why not have a spreadsheet open in the staffroom to collect the data and cut out the MIS? Then ask for a reduction in annual fees for your MIS. ' which I appreciate may not have been entirely serious. I agree entirely that the MIS should be able to collect the data, carry out the analyses we need and any others we could possibly think of - and it's that latter part that AM7 still falls down on ... and I suspect always will do. Whatever analysis and reporting tools are built into the MIS, someone somewhere sometime will demand an analysis or way of presenting data that the MIS developers haven't thought of and could only be got if the system included all the tools of the latest office suite. I'd rather have a reliable, well-structured database that will produce the most commonly needed analyses easily, has a user-friendly front end and proper access to all the data than something that tries to be all things to all men & ends up frustrating people because it can't do things they're used to being able to do in excel or word.

So download the podcast?

Because some people: can't remember the password have never come across a tabbed workbook don't know how to scroll accross a spreadsheet and so think the column they need is missing only remember to include every member of their group if the whole class is listed together fill down on a filtered sheet sort only the bit of the sheet they care about think that the data validation lists are wrong and have enough expertise to overwrite it and put in the 'right' type of data save corrupted sheets with the original title or versions of it with thoroughly uninformative names (having been confused by request for a second password) ... OK, with appropriate protection, training & extra columns none of those are a big issue, but we collect and analyse data in Excel every term (and then some, thank you National Challenge) and all of the above are issues that crop up time & time again ... and that's with one book per faculty (I've not got time to generate one per teacher). I dread to think what would happen if I let 60+ staff loose in a workbook big enough to hold everything. So I'm hoping the opposite: that we'll soon be able to collect the data through SIMs because it is much better than I am at asking individuals for exactly the information they need to supply and preventing people muddling things up. OK it will take a lot of time to set up, but so far I've found exporting info from SIMs relatively painless and so will still be using Excel for most of the analysis because of the issues listed by JoshJohnson. PS Which is a shame, because some of the tools in Performance Analysis are quite nifty.

Happens here every time too. Network manager came & fixed it for me yesterday (it was the first time I'd tried to use exams since the upgrade, so he's not a slacker). He knew what the problem was, fixed it & has assured me it won't happen in August. He didn't explain what was going on but I know he lurks here too, so it's either wait for him to pop up and say what the issue was or/and I owe one of you guys thanks by proxy ...