"Class of" Format Best Practice?

@Michaela Walker it just occurred to me that the elementary school students may have been entered with only two digits for their class year. I've always entered Class of as a 4 digit format so that it is very clear if I need to export anything and sort by year.

Once you change the display to four year, I would recommend doing a Query with that in your output and see what is really showing. If you have a 3rd grader who graduated in 1922, change it to 2022 and that should fix the issue.

It is possible that this is a combination of the display configuration AND your underlying data.

Karen

@Michaela Walker:

@Karen Diener Thank you, Karen! The issue is - that once I change to four digit it changes the addressee so for alumni it doesn't read FName LName ‘XX. I wish the addressee formula would provide the option to change the class of year to two digit for that purpose.

When you do mailings do you include a class year suffix?

Thanks again and Happy Friday!

That makes sense. In configuration, if you change it to display 4 year digits, that's how the addressee formula will look. If you change it to display 2-year digits, the formulas will work just fine and display what you want.

That school did not use the class year in mailings. It didn't seem to have a strategy - the alumni know their class year, and the school didn't need to “prove” that they knew by including it on the envelope. Some alumni began to complain too, because it gave away more information than necessary. I've worked with a couple of schools now, and class years are not typically included on mailings.

@Michaela Walker
I've worked in a handful of schools. In the high school setting we did include the class year in the addressee for mailings so used 2 digit format. But in the lower/middle school environment we do not include it. It does not seem to have a real reason to be there, so we have 4 digits. Not including seems to be the way to go.