gibberish text in custom crystal grade reports

Barbara Prine

We use Crystal 11 for developing custom midsemester grade reports. Comments written by teachers regularly display gibberish at the start of the comment, such as this: Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; so-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} The "fix" is is to access each comment individually via the Grade Module, click on the down arrow and then Save. Afterwards, the comment prints normally. If for some reason, comments need to be re-posted from FAWeb after the fix has been applied, it needs to be done all over again and is quite time consuming. The comments look normal in FAWeb and in Word, which is what most teachers use to write comments. For the terms that we are able to use built-in grade reports, everything prints just fine. Is anyone else experiencing this? We have been unable to find the cause of the problem and welcome all suggestions! Barbara Kingswood Oxford School

Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE

Barbara Prine:
We use Crystal 11 for developing custom midsemester grade reports. Comments written by teachers regularly display gibberish at the start of the comment, such as this: Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; so-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} The "fix" is is to access each comment individually via the Grade Module, click on the down arrow and then Save. Afterwards, the comment prints normally. If for some reason, comments need to be re-posted from FAWeb after the fix has been applied, it needs to be done all over again and is quite time consuming. The comments look normal in FAWeb and in Word, which is what most teachers use to write comments. For the terms that we are able to use built-in grade reports, everything prints just fine. Is anyone else experiencing this? We have been unable to find the cause of the problem and welcome all suggestions! Barbara Kingswood Oxford School

Barbara,

 I don't know anything about FAWeb but it sounds like a copy-paste issue, especially if you are copying and pasting from Word.  Try copying from Word, then pasting into NotePad to strip out the formatting before pasting into FAWeb. 

There is probably a better solution than this workaround but I just don't know enough about FAWeb to be of any more help.

 

Barbara Prine

Josh Bekerman:

Barbara,

 I don't know anything about FAWeb but it sounds like a copy-paste issue, especially if you are copying and pasting from Word.  Try copying from Word, then pasting into NotePad to strip out the formatting before pasting into FAWeb. 

There is probably a better solution than this workaround but I just don't know enough about FAWeb to be of any more help.

 

Thanks for the suggestion.  We have experimented with that but stripping out the formatting is troublesome, too, as we want and need the formatting.  And asking teachers to do this for each comment is also a problem.  They are mandated to write comments in Word.  We are puzzled as to why a comment pasted in for one student is fine and yet the same teacher may paste in a similar comment for another student in the same class and it's haywire.  I've opened several cases with Blackbaud, and so far there isn't a tidy solution on the horizon.  Comments pasted in from Word to FAWeb print fine when we use Blackbaud's built-in reports for the semester grade reports but those versions aren't adequate for our midsemester reports, unfortunately.

 Barbara Prine

Kingswood Oxford School