‘Preparing’ a report is the process of setting the date range for a report, selecting its output format (PDF, CSV or Excel) and then running the report. If you want to create a new report i.e. set its parameters, see Create reports about users.
Steps to prepare a report
- Log in as an authorised Committee member
- Reports Management
- You will see a page headed ‘Reports Management’ with a list of reports. Find the report you want, and hit ‘Prepare Report’ (a blue button in the Action column).
- Fill in the form, with the report name, date range and output format
- Hit ‘Download report’ (blue button, foot of page). The report will download to your device. The System will not store a copy of your report; you will have to store it locally.
Report Name
The System will supply the name that was entered at the ‘Create report’ stage for your report e.g. Current female leaders. You can accept this name, or change it, or you can add some text e.g. ‘Current female leaders May 2018’. When you download the report, the report name will be included in the file name.
Use Default Dates
Select this option if you want your report to cover the most recent standard CBC month (i.e. the month up till the Wednesday before the monthly Committee meeting) .
Use Custom Dates
Select this option if you want the report to cover dates of your choice, or all available data.
To prepare a report using all available data, leave Start date and End Date blank.
Note that, due to a logic problem identified by the developers, there is one case where a date range selection will have no effect. If, at the Create Report step, you selected Status = In progress, the System will not process a date range for that report. Instead, it will provide a report that lists In Progress users on the day you prepare the report. We could not think of a scenario where anyone would want a report of users who were In Progress during, say the past month of July, so we considered this limitation acceptable.
Output format
Select PDF, Excel, or CSV.
If you want output in Microsoft Word format, select PDF and then use software on your own device e.g. Adobe Acrobat Reader, to convert the PDF to Word.
If, when the report was created, its creator selected ‘All data’, we recommend you select Excel or CSV as the output format. Excel and CSV formats are better able to handle the 54 fields that comprise ‘all data’. PDF documents are usually designed for A4 paper, on which 54 fields will not sensibly fit. If you select PDF format for an ‘All data’ report, the System will display only 7 fields.
FAQ
Q. I can see a report in the list with a vague name (e.g. ‘Old members’ – does that mean past members, members over a certain age, or what?). How do I find out what its parameters are?
A. Hit Clone, and after you have looked at the parameters, hit ‘Exit without saving’.
Q. When I created this report, at ‘For each selected user, display’, I selected just 3 kinds of data. But when I Prepare and Download the report in Excel, there are several columns, not just the 3 that I selected
A. As the developers explained to us, the Excel report format requires ‘fixed cells’, which means that the columns must always appear, whether selected by the user or not. The System leaves the unselected columns empty but cannot remove them. For example, if you did not select ‘Year of Birth’, then a ‘Year of Birth’ column will display in an Excel report, but the column will be empty. You can easily delete columns in Excel.
