Custom Reports from Advanced Lists?

Nathan Ong

Hello,

We use an advanced list to pull up student attendance data and other specific information (clinical attendance for example where we have clinicians input minute entries as attendance).

The advanced list export has all the information we need for an entire month, where we then manually input these entries into a report that looks like this. Before when we were on EE, this was set up through custom crystal reports so there was no manual entry needed since it generated these reports with entries in them when we needed to on a monthly basis.

Just wondering if anyone gone through a process or would know anything about if Blackbaud has any capability / compatible plug-in or something that is able to do this? Or had any experience with any kind of custom report they need for their school that somehow integrates with Blackbaud itself.

Thanks!

Bryna Gleich

@Nathan Ong You might want to check out the Sky API too.

Chris Felinski

@Nathan Ong We do reports but we don't do them through Crystal Reports. I tried a custom upload of a crystal report but it was very cumbersome. So what we do instead is we use Microsoft Access…not the most powerful, but we are able to do reports we want.

The way we have it setup is that we have the Access database pointed to a csv file. The csv file is the advanced list we export from Blackbaud. Whoever needs to update the data just exports a new csv from Blackbaud then saves on top of the csv that the database points to. I know it isn't the best solution and we have run into hiccups, but it has worked really well for us. We started this because we wanted to have an attendance grid that listed the periods across the top and students names down the left hand side then the cells listing the number of times the student was absent to each class. It didn't exist in Blackbaud, so we did some programming in Access and it works great! We have a handful of reports we have generated over the years that used to be in Education Edge (Blackbaud's older Education solution) but aren't found in the current Blackbaud solution.