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Seating charts showing First names instead of Preferred Name

Nancy Kierstead

Is there a way we can change the Seating Chart to show Preferred Name instead of First name? Teachers post these up on the projector so students are reminded where to sit, and it is not consistent with the rest of the system. This is especially important for our Trans population. Here is an idea in the Idea portal. Vote if this makes sense to you!

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Jess Moxsky

In Core > Users > User Profile Settings, you can change the User Name Format in your system. The default is

{prefix} {firstname} "{nickname}" {middlename} ({maidenname}) {lastname} {suffix} {gradabbr}

But you can change it to display nickname, and first name if there is no nickname by using the following format:

{prefix} {nickname|firstname}{middlename} ({maidenname}) {lastname} {suffix} {gradabbr}

That name format should carry over to the rest of the system and allow you to use the nickname field for preferred names and first names for legal names. This will also impact things like directories and anywhere else user names are displayed.

Megan Day

@Jess Moxley I was working with support awhile back about the User Profile Settings and where the User Name Format actually applies. It only applies the format in some areas of the system, not all of them. For example, after an update a few weeks ago, we were seeing students first name, nickname, middle name and last name on the student list in assignment details. Way too much information for teachers to see while trying to grade. The support rep helped me update the User Name Format which DID update the student's names on assignment details but it doesn't have any effect on how names show up on class rosters, the gradebook, and now the seating charts. These are completely hard coded and set by Blackbaud. Here is another tread on the inconsistencies of how names appear across the Blackbaud products.

Susan Ott

I'm linking to my discussion on this topic - a topic which drives me mad. Just had to put a teacher's preferred name in the first name field because she put up such a fuss about it and I was overruled. And because we use Connect RE, it is now going to update that database as well. I can't keep my data standards in place when BB refuses to fix this.

Jess Moxsky

Megan Day:
@Jess Moxley I was working with support awhile back about the User Profile Settings and where the User Name Format actually applies. It only applies the format in some areas of the system, not all of them. For example, after an update a few weeks ago, we were seeing students first name, nickname, middle name and last name on the student list in assignment details. Way too much information for teachers to see while trying to grade. The support rep helped me update the User Name Format which DID update the student's names on assignment details but it doesn't have any effect on how names show up on class rosters, the gradebook, and now the seating charts. These are completely hard coded and set by Blackbaud. Here is another tread on the inconsistencies of how names appear across the Blackbaud products.

Oh wow! That's pretty frustrating Hopefully someone has submitted an idea to fix this that we can go vote on!

John Ronan

I would like to make [yet another] call for consistency across the WHOLE product. From stuff as simple as whether we can use regular expressions for searches or not.

[answer should be YES, BTW]