January Challenge: What's your favorite product tip/trick?

Crystal Bruce
Crystal Bruce admin
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 December 2025 Monthly Challenge First Reply
in Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions™ General Discussions

This month, we want to hear from you about your favorite product tip/trick that you use to make your work life easier and more productive.

Maybe you have a shortcut that saves you time, a feature that enhances your workflow, or a creative way to use our products that others might not know about. Whatever it is, we would love to learn from you and see how you use our products to achieve your goals.

To participate, simply reply to this post with your favorite product tip/trick and explain how it helps you. You can also comment on other members' posts and ask questions or give feedback.

The more we share, the more we grow as a community!

Comments

  • Vicky Lopuchowycz
    Vicky Lopuchowycz
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 August 2025 Monthly Challenge Badge Name Dropper

    @Crystal Bruce - One of my favorite tricks for creating (or actually getting data from) advanced lists is to ask the Community - sometimes you'll be told that you can't get a list of that info or the way to go about creating an advanced list might be a bit confusing so I always say ask! You never know what others have discovered or created and The Community is very willing to help and share these things.

  • Coco Parham
    Coco Parham
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    @Crystal Bruce In the system, I love Students List in Core. It is an easier way to drill down for needed data. I agree with Vicky, I like looking at the community comments and always learn about shortcuts or get valuable advice about what works.

  • Kim McAmis
    Kim McAmis
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 3 bbcon Bingo 2025 Name Dropper

    @Crystal Bruce I appreciate the ability to track when student records are shared externally. This is recorded under Academics>Grades Management>Enter Grades By Student and selecting Transcript Actions once a student is identified.

  • John Bozek
    John Bozek
    Second Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Crystal Bruce

    When i first started with BB products my biggest struggle was combining fields from the parent tables and the student tables.

    To work around this, I have figured out you can use the parents e-mail output in the student worklist (Text to columns to seperate the e-mails) to X-look up parent fields from an exported user worklist. This allows you to use parents e-mail as foreign key from the parent table in your student table export. (It would be nice if this connection was automatically made on the backend)

  • Lauren Henderson
    Lauren Henderson
    Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary December 2025 Monthly Challenge Name Dropper

    @Crystal Bruce I reference the Profile changes list multiple times a day to keep on top of new activity in BBEM and see who is doing what! It is a form of passive communication with my colleagues on how activities and projects are progressing, and supports active communication if I have questions or see something that requires my attention.

  • Heather Leonard
    Heather Leonard
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Crystal Bruce I like that I am part of a group that I met at BBcon that has loads of tips and tricks with BB products.

  • John Ronan
    John Ronan
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    This might be an obvious practice, but I have a admin-only custom field called “TmpTmp” which I use to tag arbitrary groups of records. I'll get the user_ids and last/first names of that group of records and import a value into TmpTmp. Then I just reference that in whatever operation I want.

    It's important to ensure that the values you use are unique. [e.g. you wouldn't want to use “studentSuspended” to drive a pushpage more than once.] To keep things unique, I always prefix the current value with today's date. e.g. instead of using “studentSuspended”, I'd use “2024018studentSuspended”.

    All this said, there are times when you cannot select a bunch of records based on an admin-only custom field. [sad, but true]. In those cases, I use the boarding or day field. Clear out any currently set values, then set the ones you want.

  • Troy Burki
    Troy Burki
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    @Crystal Bruce
    Similar to John's post, one simple but important thing to do with any kind of candidate/event/user/advanced list export is to include a user id/host id column in the export file. This provides a unique identifier for each record which is crucial for combining data or using formulas like V/XLookup in the event that all the fields needed for a report can't be pulled from the same list within Blackbaud.

    Another tip I like is related to importing candidate/student images into a Google sheet for creating something like a printable roster or just to be able to put a face to a name outside of the system.

    To do this, the first thing you need is to find the base link to the images in your particular instance by right-clicking on an image in Blackbaud, selecting ‘copy link address’, pasting the link, and then copying everything before large_user (I'm assuming that different instances have different storage location links). Now that we have the base link, create a candidate/student list and add any other information you'd like to include, as well as the Photo column. When you export this list, the Photo column will contain the filename of the user's picture, which is the last part of the link we need.

    Now that we have both the base link to the images and the particular filename for each user, we can combine them in a Google sheet. Assuming that we have the filename in cell A1, in the cell where the image should go enter the formula =IMAGE(CONCATENATE("paste your base link here"&A1))

    From there, you can just drag the formula down to apply the formula to the remaining rows. Additionally, the same steps/formula can be used In Excel to achieve the same thing if that's what you use.

  • John Ronan
    John Ronan
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    @Troy Burki,

    very cool!

    [does this make us a Mutual Admiration Society? ?]

  • Veronica Zermani
    Veronica Zermani
    Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Troy Burki I have been doing the same to create custom photo directories outside of the system. The last time I created one was in August for our students. Now I'm trying to create one for our employees, but the image formula is returning all blanks. I have been using the same process, so I'm wondering if Blackbaud made a change to their URLs disallowing this kind of thing? Has anyone else noticed this? We've been replying on this process to create custom rosters with photos, so it would be a shame if it's no longer possible.

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