RecChat: Report Output Customization - 10/15/2020
Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode our host Zach Malloch, is joined by Senior Support Technician, Michael Cianci to review the ability to customize report outputs to tailor them to your business needs. They walk through which reports can be customized, how to add or remove fields on Report Output Update, and ways to calculate totals.
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:08
That must mean that it's time for RecChat. Thank you, everybody for joining us today I on our side, I am joined by Michael Cianci and we have Bret Alarcon manning the chat and the question and answers. A quick reminder about the chat and question and answer before I let Mike start talking here, but we're using the QA at the bottom. So any questions that you guys have put it in there, everybody should be able to see the questions as they're asked, and upvote downvote or upvotes? Let us know if you also have that same question. Mike, how are you doing today?
Mike Cianci 0:39
I'm doing pretty good about yourself Zach.
Zach Malloch 0:41
Not too bad. So I want to talk a little bit about report output customization today, I think,
Mike Cianci 0:46
yep. That's what we'll be covering. We'll just kind of be scratching the surface. You know, it's a pretty dense topic, but we'll be taking a look at some of the more common stuff and getting our feet wet. So
Zach Malloch 0:55
sounds good. Yeah, it's definitely something that could take a couple of days of pretty intensive training to cover absolutely everything. So we'll do what we can and half an hour here, for sure. All right, well, take it away, buddy.
Mike Cianci 1:07
All right, I'm gonna share my Screen. Let's see.
Zach Malloch 1:11
A very good place to start.
Mike Cianci 1:14
We go all right, can you guys uh, you can see what I'm looking at Zack, yeah,
Zach Malloch 1:19
yes, I can.
Mike Cianci 1:20
Alright, perfect. So the the place where we'll be going to do most of our report customization is going to be report output management. This can be found by going to, in here, management, system management, report management, then report output management.
Zach Malloch 1:41
And basically the same place if somebody's using the old UI, you just be going through kind of the top menu bar rather than the X. side menu.
Mike Cianci 1:49
Yep, still the management system management report output management. And then if I remember, it's like somewhere around here on the Screen on the the old UI. In here, we have a look at all of our reports, we can tell you know which ones are custom and which ones are VSI standard based off of the data grid. In the data grid, the VSI standard reports here and output Type are going to be the ones that come standard with, you know, RecTrac. And these custom ones labeled as custom are going to be the ones that we have created ourselves. A quick note is these pink guys are our fixed reports. And those fixed reports cannot be customized. They can't be customized because they have some internal, like math, or there's some calculations in there that development is programmed in, that won't work if we customize it, and it would probably break so those guys are going to be off limits.
Zach Malloch 2:41
Also, it could be a formatting thing like you notice those two calendars there are blocked off and read under activity calendar. Same thing, if you scroll down to facility, it's just so formatted with the individual days that we can't really make a custom version of that very easily,
Mike Cianci 2:55
For sure. So let's see, the first one that I kind of wanted to take a look at was the activity roster. So I'm just going to Type in using my filters here and find the activity roster. And you can see that I've created one called RecTrac. The way that I got to there was you can find the report, which you'd like to customize I'm going to advocate for when you go to customize your report, it's going to be a lot easier to find a report that's close to what you like, or to make changes to a report just to make it more you know, customizable, or something that sits fits your needs a little bit better, versus creating a brand new report from scratch, that is going to take a lot of time and effort. So the first thing you want to do is find the report that closely meets your needs that you'll want to be customizing, I highlight it, I hit the clone Button. This will prompt a second Screen once it loads.
Zach Malloch 3:57
So basically this is copying all of the settings of the report in the background and then opening a new Screen for you to give it a little bit more information. Right?
Mike Cianci 4:06
That is correct.
Zach Malloch 4:08
And I'll also this would be a good time to point out that the actual process the workflow, the movement of editing, the outputs is the same whether using the Next Gen or the legacy UI for this.
Mike Cianci 4:21
That is correct. So in here, it gives me the ability to make a few changes. The first thing I like to change is the description. I'll change it to something that you know fits my needs a little bit better. The one piece of advice I have here is when I first started I would name the reports like activity roster and then say someone needed help. I would name it after them like Mike's report or Zach's report or Bret's report and then when I went back to look at my reports later, I was like I can't really remember what Bret's report does. There's X report does. So I always like to add in the description now like activity roster with ages or activity roster, you know, like um broken out by the code or broken out by category. And by putting the name of like what the report does in the description definitely helps a bit more, unless it's something that you use all the time. But I'm always going to advocate like putting that in there. So if someone else wants to use it, that makes it easier for them to find the report. And you know, use it for that purpose. The second thing that I sometimes tinker with, and here is the PDF layout, you can change the layout from portrait to landscape. And that's also something that I do once in a while landscape, you can fit, you know, just a few more columns in there, which is sometimes nice. So I'm just going to cancel out of here for now, you can get to kind of that same Screen before. So if you do customize a report, you can see I've got this RecChat report, which I have customized, say later down the line, I do want to change it and I want to change the name or maybe not change the name, but I want to change portrait or nope, it does allow me to change the name, or I want to change it to landscape, I can come in here, I can hit change. And I do have the ability to change it from portrait to landscape or change the name down the road, which is always nice.
Zach Malloch 6:09
And Mike, we had a question pop up there was asking if you could add activity visit information to an activity Roster report. And I think that that might lead us to discussing real quickly kind of what the base table is.
Mike Cianci 6:22
Sure. So it really depends. Each report has a built in, you know, data tables that it'll pull from specific reports are only going to pull from specific data tables. So it really depends on what information you're trying to pull. I can see here that this base table for this activity Roster report is SA detail. So that's going to be looking mostly at transactional information. transactional information has potential to pull those visits because those are transactional information. But really by like going in and looking, I like to say that, you know, report customization is a lot of trial and error. And there's never, you know, I hardly ever get it right on the first time. So I like to, you know, get into the actual report output and dig around a bit. When I hop into here, we can always take a quick look at that, because we will be popping into the guts of this activity Roster report. And from there, we could look at if visits are something that we can pull. So there's, there's potential, but once we dig in a little bit further, we can take a look at those data tables. And from those data tables, decide if that's some information that we have.
Mike Cianci 7:25
So we can we can start there. Another nice thing to mention is, uh, you can either report the detail output or the summary output, or both. By starting with a detail highlighted when I hit update report, it's going to put me into the mic updating of the output of the detail report and not the summary report. So if you want it to also update the summary report that also needs to be updated. In addition to the detail, it's not going to update the summary output, just if you update the detail output. So both outputs need to be updated independently of each other. So that's something to note. So let's hop into activity Roster report RecTrac. So in here, these are the data tables, which I was just discussing previously, I can see that these are the tables which my report can pull information from I'm given activity activity section section, enrollment count default widgets, F our class facility location, you can see that all of these tables, when I Click on one, it'll change the available fields, there are available fields in each one. If I hover over all tables, it'll take a second to load, but it's going to pull all the fields from all those tables, I think this is an okay place to start. If I then want to filter my results, I can pop in something like visit, it'll show me all of the visit types in here. So I can see I can get visit date visit info visit information. If I looked down visit count as a detail that has the potential to pull some of the information that I'd like. So what I would do is I would put that on the report, I would run the report, I would see if that information, you know, lines up with where I think it would and then I would go from there. So it really depends. It's a lot of trial and error. But I do think that we do have visit account as an ability to add on to here so there is potential that we can pull, you know activity visits through here and monitor those on our roster report. So
Zach Malloch 9:26
and could you just address the prefixes of those tables real quick like you said activity you said facility but how did you know that Mike
Mike Cianci 9:34
okay, so AR going to look mostly activity, you know, the module so it's generally the module prefixes AR being you know, most of our activities, fr facilities, it kind of uses the module prefixes to delineate which one it is. I believe sa stands for system admins X. That sounds right.
Zach Malloch 9:55
Yeah, basically just tables that are shared between multiple areas in the database there. They're not specific to a particular module. So like sa detail is for all of the transactions, whether you're registering for facilities or activities or processing your pass visit.
Mike Cianci 10:09
Definitely. The next thing I kind of wanted to take a look at was the sorted fields, this is a good place to start with customization. When I move these around, it changes the way that my reports going to sort, or the way that information dumps on the report. So the primary source is going to be the first sort that it looks at. So the first thing it's going to do is it's going to sort my Roster report out into different activity codes. So it'll be activity code, and then different activity code and it'll sort by activity code, then within activity code, it'll sort by section. So it'll be you know, activity code 001. And then with under, it'll start with section one and section two, And section three, then within the section, it'll sort by year, within the year, it'll sort by season. So it's kind of like a like a tiered way or like a hierarchy, if you would, as to how our reports going to store it going down to the lowest way. Something to make note of is these sorted fields are also pulled within these fields. So when I look at like, my saperson, if I Click on it, and I open it up with this little stylus, if I want to subtotal these fields, so like after each section, I wanted to add up the age or each section, I wanted to, you know, count how many people names are there, I can subtotal it by, let's say, like activity code, or section or first name. And it's pulling these things that I subtotal by, by my sorted fields. So if you want to subtotal by something, it needs to be in your sorted fields. If it's something that your report really isn't going to use, as far as like sorting goes, I like to toss it as my lowest sort that way to know the last thing that gets sorted, and it doesn't really matter.
Mike Cianci 11:51
So that's just something to make note of. Along with that is, while I'm in here, I could change it to count or some. So say I go to, I'll use age as an example. If I wanted to total out the ages by activity code, I would then change it to sum. And what this is going to do is it's going to sum the ages in there. So I would get a total age of all the kids in my activity code added together, and it would give me some number, I don't know if you'd ever need that for any reason. But it's kind of an example I'll use here as you can subtotal and then pick how your sub totaling within this subtotal Field, I can count, I can do a unique count. So if there's a multiple kids from the same household signed up for the same section, so I'll use like, if you have one section, and then you have like 10, or one activity, and then 10 sections under that activity, and you have a kid who signed up for all 10 sections, you could use unique count, and it'll only count that child one time, giving you a unique count of, you know, unique people that have signed up versus a total count of people that have signed up. So these numbers right here, or this subtotal area is a good way to, you know, make your reports pull a little bit more fun information.
Zach Malloch 13:11
And there's actually something I wanted to, if you did, I apologize, I was typing an answer to somebody else. But when you so when you hover over name, it shows you that this comes from the SA person record. But if you look at the full name, you can see that it says a person underscore name last first. So this is going to print the person's last name, and then the first name. So if you see tables that looks like they're the exact same thing, like if you did a search over on the side for a name, you would see maybe a couple of different tables that have the exact same thing of name. But then you'd also see there's name first last, there's name last comma first. So there's a couple of different options that you have when you're trying to add those fields over.
Mike Cianci 13:55
Sure. And then just a quick aside, when I'm creating a report, and I kind of like say there's something I want to look at. So let's go to like activity management. And then I want to hop in, I'm just going to pick any activity, we'll do fitness equipment orientation, When I Toggle on the ability to use the information fields, so like I believe it's support, I believe it's where did we hear it is enable in app help. So when you enable your in app help, you can hover over and it kind of tells you what each Field does what I like and what I use for customer reporting is if you look all the way down at the bottom, you can see Field name act AR activity, long description. So each information bubble or information area in the database will also tell what data table and then what cell it's looking at. So I know that this is a our activity, pulling from that data table and then long description. So if I wanted to go and add that to my report, this specific cell While I can then hop back into report output, I can then go to AR activity. And I know that this long description cell is that cell that I was just looking at here. So AR activity long description, I come back into here, report output. And I know that this is a our activity long description. So if there's a specific Field in the database that you're looking for, just be aware that you can look at that, and then use it to reference within your report output. So that's just a trick that I use when I'm creating these custom reports. Let's see, the next thing I kind of wanted to touch on is adding moving or you know, subtracting columns from the data grid, you do have the ability to hover in between each break, and we can make these columns wider or less wide. We can also move these around, the tip that I use to move these around is I add an additional row. And then we can kind of juggle these around, it needs to be slid into an open cell. So if I've got this first row, and it's completely full, it's not going to just let me drag primary email over primary phone that's going to switch them, I always add in the second row, that way I can kind of use it to pull these into and muck around in. So that's a another fun tip that I have there.
Mike Cianci 16:26
We can also merge these. So say I want name to go into two columns, I can take this. And I can slide it over. So it's now highlighted in these both columns. If I hit merge, it merges those two columns. And now name first last is actually going to take over both columns. So that's another, you know, just a useful tool within report output. Let's see. So one of the things that I did just because I feel like you know, a lot of people like to do stuff like this is the total fields. Within the total fields, we have total enrollments, which is something that I added. What it is, is I added sa detail ID, sa detail ID is just a unique identifier for each transaction in the database. So when I'm running a report for enrollments, it's looking, it'll create one sa detail ID per enrollment. So a count of SA detail IDs is actually account of my total enrollments. So this will be my total enrollments. And then I decided to break out total enrollments by age. So what I did was I took sa detail ID, I dragged sa detail ID again, and again. So let's just kind of take a look at that.
Mike Cianci 17:44
Insert at end. So what I did was I took sa detail ID and dragged it over into here. If I open it up, I can then change the label. So I took I took the label, and I changed it to total enrollments. And then from there within total enrollments, this just gives me a number of total enrollments, what I wanted was total enrollments broken down by age. So I came into here, and I found s a person age years months, I dragged it into my total by area. So you can take a Field, you can drag it in, I'm not going to drag it in, because that'll wipe out my essay person Age years. I totaled that value by count. So now what it's going to do is it's going to give me a count of every one of these ages throughout my report. And to kind of take a look at what that looks like I already have that kind of booted up over here. I have my activity enrollment report, I'm just going to run for all activities, my database, I'm running for my VSI activity roster, report, rec chat going to hit process. This shouldn't take too long to run. Also something to know I think Keri hit it last week, but they print selection criteria, a very powerful Toggle here. What this is going to do is it's going to show the criteria I selected. When I ran my report, I just want to make note that that always helps us over here on support to duplicate your reports. So if you just send me a report, it's kind of hard to understand exactly how you got there. This print selection criteria is going to help me figure out how you ran this report. So I'm able to duplicate that report and figure out you know, kind of where your issues were.
Mike Cianci 19:27
So let's see, that should only take a second to run. And I think I've already run it earlier. So let's go to My Documents center. Let's grab activity roster RecTrac. Boom. So my report maybe a little little junked up with us some stuff in here, but you can see I've got my enrollment report. Here we go. My enrollment report and just gonna plug through because I didn't make too many changes. To the actual enrollment report, what I changed sort of the total fields, so I tacked in down at the bottom total number of enrollments. So throughout my report, I now get a total numbers 79 Total people enrolled, and then I broke it out by age, you can see I must not have a lot of ages entered in my database, because I've got 48 ageless people. And then it gives me a total or a tally of how many people of each age have enrolled. So that's just something you can do. I've done this with a, you know, like household fee code to get a total of residents, non residents or category for residents, non residents, it's just a good way to break down, you know, total enrollments by a specific way you want to see it. So again, a lot of people like it by resident non resident, in this case, I did it by age, just because you know, that was an easy something for me to whip up. So let's see. And then down at the bottom, you can see, this is my selection criteria didn't go too crazy, didn't select the whole lot ran it pretty wide open. The data here,
Zach Malloch 21:03
a quick question for you, Mike. With the reports or with rosters, is there any way to add a number for the enrollees?
Mike Cianci 21:13
Not sure what you mean, add a number four in so just
Zach Malloch 21:18
basically each enrollee has a number maybe the order that they enrolled in the class or something along those lines. And, Hannah, if you have a clarifying point to that I know there are a couple of people asking for that. Would it be just the order that they enrolled? Or would you want to just go one through 20 Regardless of whether they enrolled in a particular order, if they're a particular age, because you know, the sort fields? And this is actually a question that Rochelle had Mike about the sorted fields. I wanted to just address that real quick. So the sorted fields will change the order that people show up like right now it's going to sort them by their last name, and then by their first name. So if there's two Smith's it's going to print Smith, Angela before it prints Smith, John, your question specifically, Rochelle is about the season. And in this case, I would say that, yeah, there's not really any purpose for having season as a sorted Field. Most people's but that's just because most people's activity numbers are controlled, or the season number is built into the activity numbers over already sorting by the SEC, the activity code, we're already effectively sorting by season. But it is important to use those sorts of fields so you know what order they actually come through. Okay, and so we did get a little bit of clarification. So Robin is seeing if there are 10 people, she wants them to be labeled as one through 10, regardless of how they enrolled. So it's more line number of the report, it looks like we're looking for here. Let's see, actually, Hannah's clarifying this. And she's saying that she's maybe looking to clearly see that there are six people registered for one class or only four for another. And I think that maybe you could get that just by having the subtotal of the number of enrollees included in your report, then maybe that's not going necessarily right through the list. Because if you're just going one through 10, regardless of order, you know, you could run the report twice, and depending on the source, maybe have one person show up as number two at one point. And number four is another point, it's the same person.
Mike Cianci 23:34
So I think for that is and maybe you know, I'm missing the mark here. But in the the header fields or at the top of your report, you get the overall enrollment count. This overall enrollment count should give you right at the top of your report the number of people that have been enrolled in your report, or number of people enrolled within this AR section. So at each space, you should be able to see. I don't know, I don't know if mine was a good example. Because I don't know if it really showed that too. Well.
Zach Malloch 24:06
That's I think I saw that it was showing zeros even though
Mike Cianci 24:10
Yeah, I did say that as well
Zach Malloch 24:11
maybe two
Mike Cianci 24:12
Yeah.
Zach Malloch 24:14
Which would be more of an indication of a problem with this report,
Mike Cianci 24:17
or my database. So you can see like here, I've got a max count. So the max count of people in the classes this allows 50 people in the class, the number of people enrolled would be four and then on the way it was I have zero people. So this kind of is a good delineation or showing of that, if I understand correctly.
Zach Malloch 24:37
Yeah, and so she's clarifying and saying that some part time employees don't aren't really familiar and they don't look at the top of the roster for that. That would there be an easy way to put that number a little bit more in line with the list of people Mike?
Mike Cianci 24:51
I mean, so what you could do is you know, I can just do it real quick, is in report output if I go to sub header or detail Field Let's, let's just take a name. And I don't, it's not going to look as pretty as I think I would like it to look. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to subtotal by, let's do activity section. And then I'm going to throw a count on there. So what this is going to do is it's going to subtotal name by activity section, and then put a count on the number of names per activity section, and then dump it at the bottom. So let's kind of take a look at what this is going to look like. Because I think it's going to do what you want it to do. I just don't know if it's going to look as pretty as you'd like it to look. And while that runs, I think there might be a way to get like enrollment order or a number on the report. But I'm having trouble thinking of how to do so just off the top of my head. So I can take a look at that and possibly answer it like the follow up. Questions.
Zach Malloch 25:58
Yeah. And while that's running, there's another question a different version of that question. That's maybe another way we could look at it. So Katie says that she also was curious about it with the waitlist, so she can see what order to enroll people off the waitlist for an activity would be and one of the thoughts that I have is if you use receipt number as a sort Field, you could potentially run your roster sorted by receipt number, and that'll show you the order that people enrolled in the class,
Mike Cianci 26:25
right, or using something like sa detailed transaction date, and your sort should sort it by transaction. So you can see here, but see, I what I did was I sorted the names by activity section, and then I put a count on it. So you can see that at the bottom, it's going to put a count on the total number of people in my section. So I don't know if that's nicer than this. But it's another way to provide a count on the number of people in the class, I guess.
Zach Malloch 26:57
And something to note real quick, because you put that subtotal on the names that's looking for how many names are within a section. So if you ran this report for showing both enrolled people and people on the waitlist, you get a combined total for that, because you could potentially put the subtotal on the enrollment status. And then you'd have the number of people that are enrolled, the number of people that are waitlisted. So and we're starting to kind of balloon into why report output customization is such a big topic, we've talked about one report, we're already at half an hour. And we have 10 questions that are kind of out there about this. So let's just simplify this, you can't put a line number Field, we could certainly put an enhancement request to add something like that. But then we I think there'd be some nuance to figure out. But there are a couple of other ways to make that number of people in the class a little bit more obvious. And once again, changing the sort order. If you sorted by enrollment date, time, or if you sorted by receipt number, then you could get a really good idea of who did what at what point
Mike Cianci 28:02
for sure, I guess there's just like two or three more things I really wanted to dig into. One of them was you can see how these have stars next to them. When I look at the report, these stars are favorited fields or fields that are commonly used when creating these reports or when people customize these reports. If I scroll down you can see that a lot of these don't have stars, all I have to do is Click on the star next to it and it creates it or makes it a starred section or starred area. And then next time I come into this report, it's going to show up back at the top so if I think some of these are ones that I don't actively use that often when customizing reports I can Toggle those off and then I can also Toggle some that I use more commonly on and then those just show up at the top of the available fields so I'm able to you know grab those more easily. Let's see. I just wanted to take a brief look at my Facility Reservation report because this is just you know gives a little bit of you know, change a flavor from the Roster report. In total fields that's what I customized again, I kind of left this pretty close reservation number recipe class. I left it pretty similar to how it comes out of box but in total Field added fee paid by facility fee paid by location and fee paid by class two sometimes I like to break down the fee paid at the bottom of the reservation report we have this fee paid Field. The fee paid being sa detail total paid less deposit.
Mike Cianci 29:26
This shows the total amount that came in through our facilities throughout all of our reservations on our reservation report. I then broke that down by specific facility I broke it out by specific facility location and by facility class. I did it very similar to how I did it in the activity Roster report. If I want to pop in here, you can see that I broke down total paid less deposit by this one's fr facility short description and then I've got fr location short description and fr class short description. I totaled that by a sum so it's going to add those totals and then I just kind of wanted to take a brief look at it because I just wanted to give you know a different different look at some of these reports. So when I hop in the Document Center, I happen to Facility Reservation report, we take a brief look at this, I scroll all the way down to the bottom, you can see that I have my Facility Reservation report, it dumps out, you know, the reservations, reservation dates, facilities, locations, classes. It does all this fun stuff. It does total it out here. But then I always like to see it simplified. So what I did was I broke out the total fee paid by facility. Here it is by specific location. And then you know, this is a break before I customized it. So let me just grab this better one, which looks a smidge nicer. So you can see it's broken out by facility broken out by facility location and by facility class. So here I can see that $135 came in through Crestwood park here, I can see Crestwood Park being the name of my facility location, and then parks would be right here for the amount of money that came in. So it's just a nice way to break down the reports, I like using the total fields, I think that's a fun way to do it, because we can get most of that information in there. But again, this isn't going to copy over to my summary version, this is just going to, you know, take hold of my Facility Reservation report run in detail. If I wanted to In summary, I'd also have to go add those fields to the total fields in my summary output. So that was me talking real quick for a second, just because I want to cover a few more things. I don't know. Zack, did we have any more questions I might be able to hit here at the end? I'm sure I do.
Zach Malloch 31:35
Yes, we do. So let's see. So it's something to address because kind of like what you saw with you some of your enrollment count fields didn't seem like they were displaying properly. And that was one of Robins issues. So maybe we can Mike can check in and see why his isn't totaling and you can see why you're he can maybe reach out to you, Robin or somebody can reach out and see if it's the same sort of an answer. Real quick, just kind of going through and see if we can clear a couple of things. So Gloria, you asked you have an activity roster template asking for participant addresses, it shows address one and address two, but it doesn't actually print the lines. anything off the top of your head with that Mike, or would we need to see the actual output
Mike Cianci 32:22
I kind of like I was pointing out before, what I do is I want to go into household management, I want to take a look at the cell that they put into their report. So here, I'll just go to good old colon, I'm gonna hit change. And then I'll actually look at the information provided. So when I come down here, and I look at address Field, one, I want to hover it as a household primary address one, I then want to make sure that there's information here. So if there's not information in there, I wouldn't expect to see anything on the report, I would verify on the report, I would look at specifically what sell you have, and then track that sell to the specific person and see if there's information in there. Generally, it's a you know, you're looking at like s a person or you know, just, you're just missing if I just a little bit to where it's an address Field, it's just not the address Field we want or maybe you put in like sa detail address, and at that point, they didn't have an address, and now they have an address a sa household. So I would recommend just taking a look at what cell you have. And then actually looking at that cell and verifying that there's information in it, that'd be my best piece of advice.
Zach Malloch 33:32
And that that lies or kind of belies a little bit of the complexity that can come into report output management. So Mike was talking about the the address Field that you find in SA detail versus the address Field on the SA household versus the address Field on sa person. And so like the address Field on sa household will get copied into the address Field in SA detail as long as it was there as it was there as of the time of the transaction. So like sa detail is all about what happened at that point. So you could go in, you can change things about the person later on. But the SA detail stuff is still going to be kind of like as of the date of the transaction.
Mike Cianci 34:08
Right? So yeah, that can always be a little confusing, but like if your household changes, like, and it's not going to go in retroactively change those essay detail fields, those essay detail fields are locked in at the time of transaction. So like if even if you change your address, it's not going to go back and change the address on those historical records. So that can sometimes be confusing. Alright,
Zach Malloch 34:31
so Heather has been waiting for an answer to this question. Is it possible to report on facilities that are not used? So it's basically trying to find available facilities or identifying which facilities are underused over the course of time?
Mike Cianci 34:47
I can't think of anything off the top of my head. I mean, you could. I'm not 100% Sure. So what the Facility Reservation report is it looks for Facility Reservation. So you're asking for facility lack of reservation report, which I'm not 100%? Sure we have, I think we could probably tinker with like the way that we run the report to look for, you know, not statuses of like reservation Type C, I think it's just looking for reservations. And it's not looking for a lack of reservations. So it's, it's hard to say, there might be something we could do to tinker with it to look for, like open availability,
Zach Malloch 35:30
or is the facility usage report, Mike, but are you thinking that you need to have at least some reservations in there for that to show up?
Mike Cianci 35:39
I'm not sure. You're talking about?
Zach Malloch 35:44
Oh, no, I'm seeing some zero reservations on that. So there's the VSI facility usage stats report. And if you look at the preview for that, there's some days that just don't have any reservations for certain facilities. And this would show you kind of the percentage of open hours that were available versus what was actually used and should give you a percentage based on that.
Mike Cianci 36:10
Right. So yeah, it's hard. I mean, honestly, I didn't even know that was really a thing. But it's tough. Because like, when I come in, and I look at it, let's see, my database has a total of 376 reports in it. And I'm going to tell you that I do not know what all 376 do. Most people are only familiar with the reports that they use all the time, with RecTrac Having a an abundance of reports, and then the ability to customize those 376 reports and create, you know, different variations on those reports. Like we can get really in the weeds with customization. And we can get close to what people want. But it's a you know, it can get really dense really quick.
Zach Malloch 36:50
Yeah, that's very, very true. Yeah. So Shannon is asking if there's a way that you can run a report of the questions that you set up to ask in the activity, such as t shirt size, or grade, and have it print in CSV, that you could then open an Excel and then sort by that question Field. The answers I guess,
Mike Cianci 37:10
the the closest thing that I've been able to come up with, because I've been asked that question before, is running for Question Answer criteria. So what this does is I can in not a lot of people really use this question answer criteria. But what this does, I can add a question, I can add a specific answer. So I can come in here I can find like, I don't know if I have a T shirt size, but we'll say like age of participants, I'll hit Select. And then I can pick this specific age. So age one, and this report is now only going to show people that have answered the age of one. So if you've got a t shirt size report, you could dump like four reports to CSV, you could run it for small, it's only going to dump everyone was small, then you could run it for medium. It's only going to dump everyone with medium, you could run it for large only dump everyone with large. And that's kind of the best way that I've seen people getting around doing something like that. It's a site i i wouldn't know of another way besides for using this question answer criteria to dump it answered my answer, unfortunately.
Zach Malloch 38:12
All right. So Brandy is asking for custom reports. Is there a way to prevent rows pertaining to one item from splitting into two separate pages?
Mike Cianci 38:23
No, that's impossible. I've been asked that question a whole bunch of times. You're saying that like, you've got one person and then their information comes out on the top of this page or bottom of this page on top of that page? I don't believe we have. We've been asked that a lot. And I think there may be a task out there for it. But I think it's been shut down a few times. I think it just requires a bit too much work. I don't think they have the ability to force that one that split over down onto the next page. That's a frequently asked question, but I don't think there's a way to accommodate that currently.
Zach Malloch 38:59
Yeah, definitely. So Colin is asking if I want to run an activity report with the unique enrollments and all enrollments have multiple sections. Would I use the essay detail ID for this for example, after school program has four sections once a total enrollments and unique enrollments for all four sections combined?
Mike Cianci 39:16
Sure, if you were to take sa detail and add it to the total fields twice, you could pull it each way. So that's kind of what I would do. If I go to
Zach Malloch 39:25
I think just well I typically around 230 Say thank you to everybody and let them know that they can certainly leave if they want to. We'll post this recording. But if people want to stick around, we can stick we can just try to answer another few questions the next five or 10 minutes or so. So thanks for anybody that I know we've probably lost a few people already but thanks everybody sticking around.
Mike Cianci 39:48
Yep, yep. So kind of to answer that question. What I would do is I go to total Field so you can see that I have. These are all sa detail ID so I've got sa detail ID sa detail ID sa detail ID you can add it in As many times as you want, so this is total number of enrollments, I would then break it out. So in this case, maybe by like a person, I'm in the wrong area as a person, II, and then I would take as a person ID, I don't know if that's going to do exactly what I want. I know there is a way, because I've done that. So let's just say toss that in there. And then I set this unique account. But I think that's going to actually just dump a total number. I don't know, I'd have to see what that looks like. There's generally a way to do it. This is kind of what I'm talking about. When it comes to trial and error. I think that's going to work. But I'm not 100% Confident. So I then have to go run the report, see what it looks like, I might need to use a different one. But even though I've probably customized hundreds of reports, maybe even with some of you guys, it's still I don't know if when I do it, I generally have to run it several times before. I'm 100%. Sure. It's exactly what I want.
Mike Cianci 41:19
I'm thinking this might give me too many numbers there in the total fields. Do we have another question while that one runs?
Zach Malloch 41:26
Yeah, I think we have a few here. So I have a bunch of people saying that they've created specific reports and added the answers to fill in their own columns on CSV. So then you can do the sort that that original question was. So we have a lot of people that have done that. So thanks, everybody who responded with those. So here's one, can we add attendance boxes to the activity roster?
Mike Cianci 41:50
I believe we can I just want to pop down here and take a look at this guy. No, that didn't do what I wanted at all. So well.
Zach Malloch 42:09
Is it possible your total and unique are the same in this case?
Mike Cianci 42:12
It's possible but I it's possible, I'm not going to rule it out. But I would want to test further. Because yeah, that's generally not the case. I guess in a test database, it's more likely to be the case. But I would assume I've probably used someone more than once. So let's see a R, I think it's what I'll do is I'll set it to all tables, because that'll make my life a little easier. And I do believe we have attendance boxes that we can add any.
Zach Malloch 42:48
So there is a swipe at the very top, you've got your all tables. above that. So you're showing fields for all tables. But you also if you drop down from that you should also have this like or is this where we have the texts and the checkbox and that sort of stuff. default widget default widgets, that's what I'm thinking of. Yeah. So Oh, go ahead, you.
Mike Cianci 43:18
So this one, we have the line, we have the placeholder, we have the text placeholders. Super cool, kind of if anyone was in 10, three, I can toss in a few placeholders. And then when you go to run the report, I don't know if everyone tuned into Karis report, but she had a placeholder on her report, you can then go in and fill that Field fill in the placeholder Field at the time of the report run, which is nice. But I think this box isn't quite the box. We want Zack, I'm pretty sure there's an attendance box.
Zach Malloch 43:46
Yeah, so this box is just going to create a box wherever you put it in basically one per page or however many of those fields you put in there. But there's also I think, well, if you're looking for like the specific attendance box, then you might be looking for something that I haven't found so far. But we also have a couple different versions of the rosters that are a little bit more check in check out. related.
Mike Cianci 44:11
There we go ar section attendance box. I knew I just had it. Yeah, so this is the actual attendance box. It's a for you know, label record, visit attendance. But this guy you can slap in there and it will work as an attendance box Field versus using that default widget. I found this one not short time ago, but not recently. It's uh, that guy works pretty well. Again, sometimes customer reports can be a little wonky with like the spacing, so you definitely want to get it in there. You know, kind of make it look pretty with those attendance boxes. And it's probably going to take a little bit of tweaking and looking at but just be aware that there is an actual like attendance box, which is the attendance box from I believe the class attendance worksheet.
Zach Malloch 44:54
So that's great. It's good stuff. Yeah, I think we are We're running out of time here. But let's see some more points about using the sadetailed question answer Field, as long as you know the exact question number, then you can have a little bit more access to some of that. And so I think Melissa's question here was a good one. And a good reminder, we covered this last week, but what do you need to do to ensure that your report database, or that your database has the most current reports from VSI?
Mike Cianci 45:29
Okay, so if you go to, so they're added, you know, in each Build that a reports added, you get those reports, they're built into the, the, yeah, it's gonna be easier if I hit Save next, and they're built into the Build, which sounds odd to say, but when I come into here, I need to unlock those by going to if I scroll over, I believe it's status of new. When I Toggle on new, it'll show me all the new reports in my database. So let me scroll back over, I'm not sure if I have any, but if I do, I'll show you how to switch him. So let's see, these are all new reports, these new reports don't show up in the report output listing, because there's still as a status of new, if you want this report to show up in a report output listing, you can see we have all these cancellation reports that we added around like COVID time when there was a lot of big cancellations. I come in, I hit Change, change.
Mike Cianci 46:44
I mean, to hit change on any of these guys,
Zach Malloch 46:46
it's good. Yeah, they're the
Mike Cianci 46:48
change Changed Status. And it'll change that status from new, you can see that it just disappeared there. So we'll come in, we'll highlight the report. If it has a status of new we find this in report output management Status column, we're looking for the new status on reports, we take that we go to more change status, changing the status on this, we'll change it to active and then it'll show up in our report output listing.
Zach Malloch 47:15
Yeah, so then the question that automatically comes up from that we could probably predict it. Is there a bulk way to do that? Mike?
Mike Cianci 47:21
I would be.
Zach Malloch 47:24
I don't think that there actually is for report output. And the original idea was that this would happen fairly rarely. So it'd be like one or two at a time that would come in. And so not a big deal to make those changes. But the I don't know of any bulk way to do it myself.
Mike Cianci 47:40
Not sure not with the help. You can generally do like the select all rows or do something like that. But this one, you know, obviously it's not I can't highlight more than one at a time. So it's I don't think it'll allow us to do so.
Zach Malloch 47:53
Yeah. And then follow up on the attendance box question. So you open that can of worms, you have to deal with it. Mike, can they be used for a class that has consecutive weeks?
Mike Cianci 48:04
I don't know if I understand the question.
Zach Malloch 48:06
So my guess would be if there is I'm assuming that this is going to print one box per day that the class actually meets. If a if it's all part of the same section, if it just has multiple days that it meets that I'm pretty sure that you know everything, it'll show a checkbox for every single day that it meets. And joy is chiming in and saying that the classroom worksheet can do that. So that's a classroom attendance worksheet. So that's,
Mike Cianci 48:39
I wouldn't, I would assume you'd probably just run out of boxes, like depending on how your your reports set up. So like, you might just need to run it in chunks of time to get something like that show up. But again, it's it's hard for me to speculate.
Zach Malloch 48:51
Yeah. All right. So I think that that's I think, actually, Julie's point is a little bit more of the direction I was going with looking for report that's already kind of a little bit more geared towards the attendance stuff. And so I think the classroom attendance worksheet would be a good one to investigate there. And then we had, so this this question has been asked a couple of times and answered at once, but I'll just answer it the last time for everybody. But so the question is, will this recording of this session be available for people to view who weren't a part of this session? And the answer for all of our RecChats? is yes. So if you go to support dot Vermont systems.com/support/rec chat, you log into the portal, if you're already in the portal, there's a drop down menu where it says support, you can get direct chat, and every one that we've done, all the way through is out there and available for you to view anytime you want to. That's also where we were, we post the response Docs. So if you asked a question and you didn't hear it get answered or you didn't get all of it. We're going to take those and make basically a PDF version of everybody's responses there. All right.
Mike Cianci 49:58
What about do I have I don't know if I have my help indexer setups. Okay, looks like I might, but um, I did we do we stopped the longer version of this one that hatch did a while ago.
Zach Malloch 50:12
I'm not sure which one you're
Mike Cianci 50:15
so custom output design.
Zach Malloch 50:20
So that's probably a fun earlier symposium.
Mike Cianci 50:24
Okay, it is, and it's like an hour and 45 minutes, but it's I believe it looks like Patrick but I don't know, just wanted to put out there that I believe there is like a training video within the help for custom recording that goes into significant more depth. It's a it's a lot more dense. And I believe it's close to like two hours.
Zach Malloch 50:45
We also have some additional videos up on the knowledge base. So if you're on support dot, Vermont's systems.com, you go to the, the knowledge base itself, and actually, Mike, can you show how to get to support from the side menu for so there's your customer support link. So if you Click on that, you'll be presented with the portal to log into, or you Click on the support Button, you're right in the middle, the page should be right in like, big green Button waiting for you to Click on it, you log in and then up at the top, you'll have support, but you can drop down from there go to RecChat, if you want to look at those. But if you're in the knowledge base, you can see these are all the RecChat recordings and response docs. If you go to the knowledge base, you can get to some more recordings of past symposium presentations and the like. So videos down at the very, very bottom, or you can just Type it in video for 3.1. And I think that this one, so reports is right. And then yeah, there you go. That might be a little bit more recent. Although that might not be the customization. But there's a lot of stuff. The point is there's a lot of stuff in there.
Mike Cianci 52:07
That's where I was getting that there is more material besides for my 32nd RecChatter out there. So keep an eye out. And you know, there's certainly an abundance of educational content out there.
Zach Malloch 52:17
All right. And then last question, I think this is going to be super quick, about a very big topic. So Collins asking a glossary or guide have the table fields. And so we do have a program, it's called the if you just Type in dictionary, I think it comes up. And this prints out a list of all the tables and all the fields within the table with a brief description of it. And if you choose all tables in the entire system, you get all of that out. And so that might be a little bit of a cheat sheet, you let that run it runs for a while, it's a really big report, but it really doesn't change. The the tables that we have in the database are largely the tables that we're going to have in the database until the next major version release. So like 3.2, something like that. But so hopefully that helps you out Colin. There we go. There's your dictionary listing with every single Field via base, a simple label for it, whether it's a character Field, a decimal Field, or whatever.
Mike Cianci 53:15
And this is just one one table.
Zach Malloch 53:19
And how many pages is five for one table and there's a lot of tables in the in the system. So that brings us basically to almost a virtual symposium length RecChat. So I think we're going to trim things there and say once again, thank you all the people who have stuck with us all the way to the very, very end of this has been great. Thank you very much, Mike for sharing all the information. And thank you, Bret for your work behind the scenes. And you can go ahead and take us out whenever you're ready. Thanks a lot, everybody, and we'll see you next time.