customizing Constituent Directory report

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Madeleine Holdsworth
Madeleine Holdsworth
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in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
The Constituent Directory report in RE (in Reports-->Profiles, Lists, Directories) doesn't give us the info we want to include for an alumni directory.  Any ideas on what route to take or how best to customize to add fields?  I'm attempting Crystal Reports but issues cropping up such as crystal repeats a constituent for each phone type (email, cell, home....gosh I hate that phone field setup).  We need to be able to refresh the list monthly so I won't want to just export to Excel and maintain an Excel list that has to be reformatted.  Or suggestion on how to keep Crystal from repeating a constituent for every phone type value. 
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  • Kim Roesing
    Kim Roesing
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    I believe you need to do the phone, email, etc in a subreport.  It is hard to say it all debends on how you exported into access, separate tables or a single one.
  • Marie Stark
    Marie Stark Community All-Star
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    Do you want to show the constituents name, then the phone types in different columns?

    The best way to do that is to export each phone type separately in the export. You would have multiple type fields in your export, and  select 1 as the number of phones to export for each field.
  • Gina Gerhard
    Gina Gerhard
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    In the past, I've created an Export of type 'Blackbaud Simple Word Merge' and set up the merge document to look like a form. You can then merge in virtually any field onto this form, perform the merge and it will produce one form for each constituent in the query you're attaching. You can then tweak the page breaks to make it one continuous listing of data.

     
    • Doing it this way, I was able to create a more detailed 'profile' with a variety of information about the constituent.  
      • You could format this similar to a constituent directory but include more information.
      • You can also set up table layouts so your data will merge into nice table columns/rows.
    • To refresh the data, you just need to rerun the export and merge out your new data. 
    • This can be a bit tricky with multiple values (like setting up different address blocks, phones) but it can be done.
  • Patti Hommes, bCRE-PRO
    Patti Hommes, bCRE-PRO
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    For the Crystal Report you can check "Supress if duplicated" in Format Field, but that doesn't always do the trick. I have also used a subreport for address/phone/email information and that worked fine.
  • Marie Stark
    Marie Stark Community All-Star
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    You can also group the report by constituent ID.
  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
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    I echo Gina's suggestion.  I've been able to get a variety of data in the format we want using Export to Simple Word Merge. 



    I have also used Export to get data to excel (when I wanted/needed to do minor tweaks) and then merged in a Word merge doc.  I have used 'letter' for things that really didn't look like letters and Directory.  This doc if formated for merge so each week I just needed to run Export to get up dated data and then pull it into the Word directory to get the list I wanted.  Just one more step than Exporting directly to Word.
  • Gina Gerhard
    Gina Gerhard
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    JoAnn - I think this has been one of these 'hidden gems' of Raiser's Edge - the ability to merge data out and reassemble using the merge function.  You can do so many things with this, but I've never really seen it mentioned formally anywhere in Blackbaud's tips/tricks or elsewhere. Have you?  
  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
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    Gina,

    Yes, I agree.  I admit I wasn't even aware of all the options of Export for quite a while.  Just used it for exporting to excel.  I finally saw a post on forums talking about exporting into a word merge doc and decided to check it out.  While I've done training on query, import, etc. guess I never had one for Export.  Can't say I've seen Export functions really mentioned much by BB.
  • Gina Gerhard
    Gina Gerhard
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    JoAnn - I think Blackbaud presents the mail merge function only for producing letters, but it's such a great tool for getting around the limitations of the canned reports.  Glad you found it too!



     
  • Shannon Rajoelina
    Shannon Rajoelina
    Tenth Anniversary 10 Comments Photogenic 5 Likes
    Hi Madeleine,



    Kim was aboslutely right when she mentioned using a subreport in the custom directory you are trying to build. By using a subreport, you can reduce the duplications of the constituents name for every phone or email you try to print for them. I found this KB article on how to create a subreport (basically its just a report within a report). Hope it's helpful!







     
  • Madeleine Holdsworth
    Madeleine Holdsworth
    Tenth Anniversary 100 Comments 100 Likes Photogenic
    Thank you!   These are all great suggestions which I will definitely be investigating sooner than later.

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