Is there anyway to copy Summary Gift Field in Exports?

Melissa Lide

So, creating these manually is very time consuming and has plenty of space for error.

Has anyone found a way around doing each Summary Gift Field/criteria individually (because then we could edit the copied summary field instead of starting from scratch each time)?

Christine Adams

Unfortunately, not.  We do create a generic export with 20 years to reuse and just remove the ones we don't want.  You still need to go into the criteria but much easier than starting from scratch.

Milena Damianova

Would have been so helpful but unfortunately no.

James Andrews

I have given this advice many times over the years: in a lot of cases like this, I feel like exporting all the gifts and doing the calculations in an external program is quicker and more reliable. For smaller exports, SQL server or whatever you're hosted on will do these calculations quickly.  But for larger exports or ones with many summaries like this, it just takes a long time. add to that that you can't see the criteria easily without opening up every summary, and it's really easy to make errors that you can't see till your results are obviously wrong somewhere.


Exporting all the gift info and then, for instance, setting up a bunch of SUMIFS formulas in Excel -- especially now that power query is included in excel by default -- is going to be easier to read and easier to troubleshoot.

Melissa Lide

That's a good idea. We write over and save as as much as possible but that combined with not being able to set defaults (like gift type) is quite the bother.

Thanks!

Melissa Lide

Yeah, was hoping something had changed

Seems a pity for sure

Thanks!

James Andrews

Melissa Lide:

That's a good idea. We write over and save as as much as possible but that combined with not being able to set defaults (like gift type) is quite the bother.

Thanks!

I asked Blackbaud about setting default gift types back in 2000 when we upgraded from Novell NetWare and the DOS version due to the Y2K issue back in 1999. They were like, no that's not an option yet! 21 years later...