Our Recent Documents and Reports Projects

Here are some examples of the sorts of work we have done with our customers across a variety of projects that required help with their documents and reports, highlighting the features we built and challenges we faced along the way.

Contents - Click to jump to an entry

• NEW: School attainment and progress tracking and reporting
• Automatic Document Production in MS Access
• Projects Blog - Index

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NEW: School attainment and progress tracking and reporting

We have now worked with 3 primary schools to create tools in Excel to track and report attainment and progress in exactly the way they want to. We also have personal experience in the team of being a long-standing primary school governor.

In each case, the staff member responsible for reporting data has gone from a long, inaccurate and laborious effort producing termly information to being able to view their data instantly and accurately and in exactly the formats they want to see it. Base data about each pupil is entered only once over their life at the school, with termly assessment results added as they go along.

There is a view for each class teacher to see how their own pupils are progressing, and then detailed reports for the Head and summary reports for the governors - all of which are produced automatically from the one import source. The reports include breakdowns into various groups and can be by class/year group/whole school. The recording methods are customised to the school (since the abolition of levels), and one school has incorporated tracking against targets as well as ARE (age-related expectations).

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Automatic Document Production in MS Access (Word, PDF, Excel etc...)

When you have a standard form for documents you regularly use, you can program Access to populate template versions of the documents automatically with all the information needed for a specific circumstance.

For example, if you want to send a quote to a client, the system will automatically populate the quote with all the product details and prices, even a picture if required! We do many jobs in this vein, creating large volumes of Word documents, PDFs, and Excel spreadsheet reports using information extracted from data stored in Access. These might be letters, emails, reports, official forms, documentation for regulatory bodies, dossiers, timesheets, emailable invoices, logs, and much more besides. They save huge amounts of time and allow you to avoid boring legwork.

One example was for a client in the waste industry. They have to report regulatory information monthly under the WEEE directive. Previously they manually completed these particular forms. Now they fill them in by clicking a single button in their Access database.

Features:

• Creates documents to the exact required layout
• Uses Microsoft Access combined with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel
• Personalised communications
• Uses information already stored in the system

Benefits:

• Time savings
• Avoiding repetitive work and therefore mistakes
• Very easy to re-create documents if they need to be corrected/edited
• Easy to maintain and easy to evolve as needs change