Reports with bolded cells

Bob Wiebe

This question invovles Excel (or possibly other applications) as well as RE.  I am creating a list of donors to our Annual Fund. I am taking the salutation and bolding, by hand, those individuals or couples who are alumni.  I am also placing an asterisk beside those who donors who are in the President's Circle giving club.  It would be useful to me if I could use these bolded cells again, esp. because the alumni status won't change.  I understand that formatting like bolding does not copy in Excel, so if I use the cells again, I have to do the bolding over.  Is there another application which would be superior in this case, or a different process to avoid this hand work?

Jen Claudy

MS Access would work, but I'm guessing you aren't familiar with Access, and therefore, it's probably not a good option (unless you want to invest the time to learn it and use it for other things as well).



If your alumni are tagged with a Constituent Code or a field you can add to your export, then you can set up Conditional Formatting in Excel to do what you want.  The bolding of alumni would be easy there, and I believe will still work with that column hidden.



For the asterisk, you can add this (and other symbols) to RE either in a salutation (add it in an option in Config) or do what I, and I believe many others, do and put your Donor Listing or Publication Listing in an Attribute.  I converted Salutation to Attribute using the Import function, which was pretty easy once setup, and then I usually just manually copy the appropriate Salutation to the Attribute when adding new constituents, but could just as easily run my Import process again periodically or before pulling a donor list.  For example, we use "§" as an indicator and I type it directly into the Attribute field when updating the record (hold Alt and type "0167" on the numberpad of your keyboard...you can also cut-and-paste it).  Using Attribute means that when something changes on Bio1, it doesn't inadvertantly change the Donor Listing Salutation.  And you can add the same Attribute on Organization records, which sometimes request/require a listing that is longer than the allowable text in the Org Name field (or isn't what you want there as the Constituent Name).

Jason Black

I would do this in Excel. Your output from RE would need to contain a field to indicate whether an individual is an alumnus; another field would indicate membership in the President's Circle. Both fields could be deleted after the bolding and asterisks are added. The asterisk can be added using a formula, and the bolding can be done with conditional formatting. If you do this frequently, and your output is the same each time, it may be worth recording or writing a macro that you can run with the click of a button to make it all happen instantly.

Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE

You could also use Crystal Reports to do this.



In Excel, for the presidents circle asterik you can do something similar to what Jennifer said with an if-then formula and concatenate.  Something like this:

CONCATENATE({FirstName}," ",{LastName},(If {WhatEverFieldPresCircleIsIn} = "President's Circle","*",))



 

Bob Wiebe

Thanks for the suggestions.  I would do well to learn more about conditional formatting and Crystal Reports.  But given the amount of manipulation needed within the cell, e.g. one couple is Bob and Verna Wiebe* (Bob is alumnus and jointly they are members of President's Circle), one is Bob and Verna Wiebe** (both are alumni, and member of President's Circle), one is Bob and Verna Wiebe (Verna is alumnus), one is Bob and Verna Wiebe, I still would like to be able to copy those cells over in a way that keeps that formatting and asterisking (if that's a word), because I don't think any formula can generate the bolding. The immediate need is to shorten the report generation time of a report that measures a different fund, but has many of the same participants. 

Christine Cooke 2

Most educational institutions I have seen list their Alums with their graduation year, if you did that then the bolding would not have to happen.  That would take one step out.

James Andrews

I saw this thread yesterday but didn't have time to read it, but now that I have I'm not sure I understand the problem. Cell formatting copies and pastes in Excel, I just tested it.



Are you copying and pasting between programs, or is there some other reason you're losing formatting?