Export of information presented on dashboard
The main and membership Dashboards both provide do a good job of summarizing data in the system and as such provide a valuable reporting tool.
However, the essence of a report is the ability to share it with others and there is no mechanism to do this. At present these reports are on the screen only and short of taking a screen snap there is no way to pass them around.
I would find it very valuable if there were an "Export" button which allowed us to receive a download of the dashboard in Excel (CSV??) format. This would allow us to both manipulate the report and to share it with the board and our membership.
Gordon Stewart
shared this idea
-
geekeleh
commented
I would like to be able to export the
Event registration fields reportThis is where we have information on who wants what kind of meal, whether they are licensed ot not, etc. It would be very useful to have this as an excel file.
Thanks
-
Dmitry Buterin commented
Gordon,
I am still not convinced that exporting dashboards is the way to go. Making dashboards exportable is probably as much if not more work that to create new specialized report from scratch and I am not sure people need exactly the same info as on dashboards (e.g. latest donations, top 5 least recently updated pages). I would appreciate comments from other users.
Re exporting Event registrations report - yes, for sure. I will add this to our work pipeline.
Re export of certain fields - there is a thread about this, it makes good sense. See http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308920-archive/suggestions/8834323-export-limited-to-certain-fields-5378
I think I understand your other point, except for "..Export as input to the summarization tool for further manipulation...", can you explain further?
-
Gordon Stewart
commented
Dmitry -
I don't think there is much to be gained by producing reports that go much beyond what you have already provided in the dashboard reports. Yes, the dashboard reports must be exportable to Excel and (less important) as a pdf. However, any attempt to create additional pre-formatted (canned?) reports will result in numerous requests to endlessly tweak the report to meet the particular needs of diverse customers. It can never be a satisfactory tool.
However, you already have an immensely flexible and valuable tool in the Event Registration Report. This an a wonderfully flexible summarization tool that would satisfy the needs of many reports. It is simple to use and provides great summary data but (again) must be exportable as pdf and for Excel. This tool should be available to create summary reports on members and contacts.
You already allow member and contact data to be selected (and exported) by row. Can you add the option of also selecting columns? This would allow me to select rows (i.e. membership level) and Columns (First, Last, Telephone) and produce a concise and meaningful extract of a large database.
Also, and perhaps most important, it would be great if the extracting and reporting tools could be combined so that one feeds into the other. This would be analogous to the UNIX environment where an extract tool could pipe its output to a reporting tool. As an example we could used the Advanced Search to extract the rows containing membership levels "Gold" and "Silver" and the column "State". We could then send this data to the reporting/summary tool which would report on the number of members we have at these levels in each state.
This really means that there would be three destinations for data extracted from the databases
* Export as Excel (CSV) format.
* Export as pdf
* Export as input to the summarization tool for further manipulation. The summarization tool would similar to the current Event Registration Report. -
Gordon, I guess another way to look at this is to create reports (which would be printable and exportable to Excel and PDF like our new financial reports will be in version 4.0)
What are the specific reports/information that you would like to have?
