One of the great things about Student Manager is that it is VERY good at finding information that exists. In other words, if the data exists, it can be discovered/found/reported.
However, the challenge is in finding stuff that DOES NOT exist!
In Continuing Education, you often want to know:
- Which students (all or just from a specific group) have NOT taken a specific class?
- Which Students (all or just from a specific group) do NOT have a particular Interest Code?
While it does require a bit of setup, Student Manager allows you to find the haystacks that DO NOT have a needle inside.
The secret sauce is: The Names Report Flag.
The basic process here is to mark the names report flag (set it to .T. or ON) for those names who HAVE taken X course(s) or who DO have the Y Interest code.
This can be done by using the Set Filter Tool.
NOTE: Before we go into the Set Filter side, you should first go to Tools / Data Filters / Remove Filter / Names, and make sure you CLEAR any old (from some prior flagging operation) flags from the names table. Once you’ve done that, you are ready to proceed.
From the main menu, go to: Tools / Data Filters / Set Filter for Editing. While the primary use for the Set Filter area is to set a particular file (Names, Courses, Registrations) to APPEAR like there are only certain records in the file (eg., If you only wanted to see/look up/report Courses where the coordinator is, “Havlicek”). One of the options when going through the set filter procedure is to flag name records (by setting the Report Flag or Print Label Flag field to .T.). And then you can abandon the filtering on Course or Register or one of the other options.
So, if you wanted to find out which students have NOT enrolled in a class for the current semester, you would go into the Set Filter for Editing/Courses. You’ll get a Query Manager tool (the standard one used in report queries). Pick a query that would pull the class(es) that you want to know which students DID NOT take. So if you want to know what students did not take classes in Spring 21, it’d be Course Number = ‘21S’ (if using suggested Manager coding). When you run the query, you’ll be presented with a choice (see image 1 below).
You would pick: “Flag REPORT LABEL”
You’ll get a couple of message boxes telling you about prior flag operations, if you want to “Count” cancelled reggies, and then finally be presented a box (see image 2 below).
You’d typically check YES (assuming you don’t really want the course filter).
Now, what you’ve done is flag EVERY name in the database that is/was enrolled in a Spring Course.
Whew: Done with step 1
Step 2:
Now that we know which names ARE enrolled (the name Report Flag is .T.), you can go to any name reporting area (Mailing Labels, Names w/Codes, etc.) and set up a query:
Name Report Flag is FALSE (and any other name filtering option you might want).
When you run that, you will get all names that ARE NOT/WERE NOT enrolled in a Spring 2021 class.
In this second step (the set filter/query for names) you will typically only want to compare a selected set of names. i.e.: Names added AFTER a date? Names with a specific Interest code? Names from a particular City? Zip Code? Etc. So you’d have a query that is:
Name Report Flag = .F. AND Nmcity = < ask later >
SO, there you go. How to use the Report Flag to find people who AREN’T/WEREN’T there!
PS from Sharon! Chuck will discuss this as well as other report functions at
conference.