We struggled with data for a few years and decided we couldn't wait anymore. We've built a series of Advanced Lists and use the API to download them nightly into a data warehouse we built in SQL. It's still not perfect, but at least we can use queries to pull grading, roster, award, assignment, and bio-info.

Reporting is not straightforward and it is hard to get all of the information needed without doing advanced work.

Janet, that is a start, but it is extremely frustrating for those who came from EE where we had a good amount of control over reports/exports.  This should be a top priority and we shouldn't be limited to only a subset of data. 

We are addressing reporting needs in a two -pronged approach.  See the Lists throughout our application for access to fields on Candidates, Students, Users, etc.  This is the primary way we plan to expose as many fields as possible.
The future of report building as dashboards with analytics is available today in RE NXT with giving data.  The Report Builder allows you to combine prebuilt insights and filters onto pages to share out with other users. There is an add-on called Insight Designer that gives you a subset of fields and measures to build your own visualizations and charts to combine on those report pages.  When this is released in Education Management solution (aka ON Products) it will come with the same data elements available on our existing prescriptive Analyze dashboards, but allow you to build your own combinations on report pages, and (for the same single add-on fee across all Blackbaud solutions) optionally the insight designer to build your own visualizations.  Over time we will add more data sets to this analytic component, but it is not intended to hold every field that can be stored.  I hope this helps. 

Last comment in this thread is in 2017. Tis 2019, is there custom report solution for BBk12? 

I agree wholeheartedly with Joseph Dioguardi. Schools need to be given the ability to pull on ANY field in order to create the reports that are specifically important to each school. Admission Offices, as well as board members or administration, have needs that cannot come from canned reports or dashboard statistics. To not have the freedom to use the data as we see fit, we are constantly attempting to cut and paste, merge and rework, reports in the ON products. This is all time consuming and frustrating.

A Sky User Report walkthrough - Jake: maybe you can clarify how this is supposed to work. Or keep in mind for refining the Help around this function.

I can get to a fair amount of fields, but...

See attached images.

- The initial interface just has School Year, Grade and Gender filters. (1st image) Seems very limited, but more fields are available further in the flow

You can click one of the gender bars for a grade in the chart, to drill down... oh wait, I can click on the Grade label to get both genders. Not obvious.

- Then, a table slides out from right side, with results. (2nd image)
We could use the criteria from our chart click displayed here. No idea what they were. In fact, if I clicked Male segment on bar chart, Male isn't even preselected in Filter in that table, nor shown as a column.

- Clicking Choose Columns, in that table slideout, one has a lot of fields. Maybe all relevant ones? I'm not feeling like cross-referencing at the moment.  One could display a lot of columns, but then need to export to spreadsheet to filter on then.

Click Filter, in that table slideout, one has much fewer columns. (3rd image.)  Why the smaller subset here?

---

Maybe this makes sense to people more versed in data mining. Is all data available this way (after exporting to csv?)

Hi Jake,

The dashboards are very nice but with out inclusion of every field and the ability to filter all of those fields they are not very useful They are an attempt by Blackbaud to make a  best guess at the analyses school wish to have instead of letting schools have the flexibility to analyse the data that is important to them. Independent schools are apples and oranges, so creating a one size fits all dashboard is not helpful. They also do not address the central question of this Idea post which is to give schools easy access to the data they put into the database and allowing them the ability to filter and export the data as needed. There are plenty of third party tools that will allow us the ability to create nice charts, graphs and custom reports. We simply need to get the data out of the database in ways that may be useful to only our school and no others. Full access to the data is the central function of a SIS system and we simply do not have it in OnRecord. SKY reporting lists are an excellent step in the right the direction but the limited number of data fields defines the limitation of their usefulness. Please drop development of everything else in OnRecord including SKY Dashboards and give us access to the data we are giving you.

Thanks,

Jed 

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I'm curious if you have used the new SKY Reporting dashboards? These in conjunction with SKY Lists are where we are headed with these kinds of reports. We are also working on a drag and drop report creator that will allow you to create your own reports. We're not planning to implement queries per se, but I think you'll find these new options to be very useful. Thanks for bearing with us as we continue to improve these functions. There are a lot of improvements on their way!

A mechanism to provide input to something as generic as Crystal Reports would take this a *long* way.  And this is *very* important.

We, for instance, use Crystal to generate something as critical as our transcript.

Our class and family rosters take a tremendous amount of time to massage together from data extraction into Excel each year. The Excel report was written for us by an expert and frankly needs to be run by an expert each year if problems arise. The canned rosters available in reports just don't work for our needs.

I echo what was said by Claudia in that we were used to building very specific queries and reports in Education Edge and now have become very limited. I feel that we should have the same functionality in report building that we did previously in EE.

This would definitely make it easier to pull information in a variety of formats and look nicer than simple excel files.

A follow up for Vincent - Many of these issues would be solved by the oft-promised additional custom publishable fields. Why, in 2016, is there a need for such a low limit on custom fields?

Appending School Form (both regular and medical) data as an option is needed too, as we collect critical medical data via them because not all is available in core system.  For example, our Permission to Treat, which medical staff need, is a signed onCampus School form with legal wording, not just a checkbox in Medical.

So, a Report builder would be something like: Include: Core data sections X, Y, Z (hide fields g, l and m which we don't use, and to include them is misleading); Append School Forms A, B, E, if regarding student; page break after each student, or not.

And filter by School Level (AND, not Or), like Lower AND Middle School ... and/or Grade ... or Class/Team...

(School Form data is kept in XML files, not core data tables. So you can't build Lists off of it. But it's obviously reportable.)

Would love to prepare "nice looking" formatted reports that faculty, staff, administrators can then produce on their own without having to come me.  Very time consuming to to produce a list and then perform a complex mail merge in word.

I truly believe this is a priority for the student information portion of the system. Efficient reporting and data extraction is a MUST.

Coming from Education Edge where building custom Queries and Exports was completely manageable, I have found it very frustrating to get even the most simple pieces of information exported in an efficient manner. Please help!