Cronkgarrow

Your bespoke front end to bypass sims sounds like my idea of heaven to be honest. SIMS is the most unfriendly and counter-intuitive piece of s.... oftware I've come across in a long time... and I thought SIMS.net was supposed be all shiny and new and sensible... but no. Although I'd love to have something like your system running, I'm not the SIMS manager, so it'd be a major fight. I don't really have the skills. Our last SIMS manager did a lot of his own bespoke things, but when he left they all got dropped because noone knew how to keep them working. So, in the meantime I shall just have to live with things as they are, and hope that the SIMS manager can learn enough so that my system can be dropped.

Hello again, Thanks for the replies, browsing the code now, although tiz making me headscratch somewhat. Thank goodness it's been well commented. I still can't work out how to make a report have assessment manager data in it - I'm such a SIMS noob. Have spoken to the SIMS Manager and she's not been amazingly helpful. Politics is involved as currently there are two traffic lighting systems in school - hers and mine. Mine is in excel, hers is in SIMS. Hers can't do everything mine can do, but in some ways I prefer hers. I think I'll try pushing her to get hers perfect so that SMT can let me drop mine. I've passed on the traffic lighting that matt40k gave me - lets hope she gets keen. In the meantime people, thanks for all your ideas, it's given me some thoughts, but in the end the SIMS manager is right, we shouldn't be having two systems in one school. Thanks All!

Well the main reason SMT want to stick with my Excel sheet, as opposed to the traffic lighting directly in SIMS, is that our SIMS manager doesn't know how to show all subjects one sheet per child, with colouring. I think her and I need to put our heads together a bit. I'll have a chat with her tomorrow.

Cool. So I can specify what fields in what columns and what the "tab" it should go to? If that's the case I should be able to make my life soooo much easier.

You're talking to someone who's never done a report in SIMS! I don't really want to get in to using word at all if I can help it - my spreadsheet allows staff to look at whole years/classes by subject, or to look at individual pupils, with all subjects. The colouring is based on a lookup table at KS3,and on a simple comparison at KS4. I just need to be able to pull the raw data off - but I'll have a look at reports a bit when I'm next back in school (I work from home four days a week). Greg

Hiya, Thanks for the reply. I dabble in vba - but mostly hijacked code from MrExcel.com. So when you say scripted you mean build the whole spreadsheet from scratch using script? That's pretty daunting. I was thinking more of reporting the base data to a spreadsheet, which my main spreadsheet would pull data from. When reporting, can you get it to overwrite an exisiting spreadsheet with the same name? And as for reading SQL - the spreadsheet wouldn't be editable by the user, it's used for reference by teaching staff. The fact it's doable is all I really needed to know - I can mention it as a possible training possiblity - if I can bypass SIMS entirely I'd be a happy man (I sooo hate SIMS!).

Hi all, I for my sins developed a system using Excel that colour coded students grades or levels depending on whether they were on course to hit their target, miss their target, or a near miss. This is done for all years and all subjects. The formulae and conditional formatting all works fine. What doesn't work fine is the update process - at present, after every round of data collection, I have to pull a marksheet off for each subject and each year. This gets rather time consuming. What I want to know is there a way of simplifying this by producing (or automating) a report that updates a master spreadsheet (or a bunch of them) - so that my traffic lighting spreadsheets just need to be changed to refer to the data sheets. I have also wondered whether it would be possible to use SQL within sims to interrogate SIMs' data directly. I know nothing about SQL but have thought if I could bypass the SIMS program altogether then I could make things much simpler. I could then nag to go on courses etc. Or is there a third option I'm missing? The SIMS manager has started doing some traffic lighting of her own, not as subtle as mine, but ok in itself. It just doesn't allow you to look at one student, for all subjects, and see by colour how they're doing. Any help and suggestions gratefully received. Cronk