Duplicate Rows in Pivot Reports

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Gemma Windle
Gemma Windle
Ninth Anniversary First Reply
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
Hi all,


We're hosted, and I'm tryng to use Pivot Reports to measure some of our organisation's KPIs- but I can't understand how anyone does it!  The queries I'm basing my reports on (mostly constituewnt queries, but also with gift queries) generate duplicate rows. Obviously, for other purposes I would export this and get a very tidy one row per constituent, but this isn't an option here.


Having these duplicates means all of my measures are wrong. For example, when creating a Pivot table for number of donors who have given gifts under a given campaign, many of the donors and their gifts are counted twice. Equally, the sum of these gifts is also wrong. I understand that in Excel 2013 there is an option to count 'unique' records which would overcome this for some measures (e.g. number of unique ConsIDs, GiftIDs) but not others (many gifts will be the same amount!). However, RE uses Excel 2007, so there isn't much opportunity for this anyway.


I know that I could export the data and create these pivot tables in excel outside of RE, but this is too clunky for my needs. Surely there must be a way of doing this in Raiser's Edge? Otherwise, how does anyone use the Pivot Reports function at all?!


Any answers would be greatly appreciated!
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  • Ryan Hyde
    Ryan Hyde
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 3 Name Dropper Photogenic
    It sounds like your query must be producing duplicates and that the report is not removing those duplicates. There's two ways youc an approach this problem.


    1.)  The most sure fire way to fix it is to fix it in Excel. When you're to the point where you see your Excel spreadsheet, click on the tab at the bottom left of the screen that says "Data," then click on the ribbon header that says "Data," and click on the button that says "Remove Duplicates." 


    I'm guessing that you'll want to leave all of the boxes checked when it asks you how you want to define duplicates, but you'll have to determine that for yourself.


    2.)  Suppress duplicates within the query itself. Note: This doesn't always work, so don't rely on this. You'll want to do the deduping within Excel as well.


    In your query, go to Tools > Query Options > Record Processing and check the box next to "Suppress duplicate rows." Again, this won't absolutey fix the problem 100% of the time, but it sometimes fixes most of the problem. That said, if you want to skip this and only use the Excel solution, then that's no problem.
  • Gemma Windle
    Gemma Windle
    Ninth Anniversary First Reply

    Ryan Hyde:

    It sounds like your query must be producing duplicates and that the report is not removing those duplicates. There's two ways youc an approach this problem.


    1.)  The most sure fire way to fix it is to fix it in Excel. When you're to the point where you see your Excel spreadsheet, click on the tab at the bottom left of the screen that says "Data," then click on the ribbon header that says "Data," and click on the button that says "Remove Duplicates." 


    I'm guessing that you'll want to leave all of the boxes checked when it asks you how you want to define duplicates, but you'll have to determine that for yourself.


    2.)  Suppress duplicates within the query itself. Note: This doesn't always work, so don't rely on this. You'll want to do the deduping within Excel as well.


    In your query, go to Tools > Query Options > Record Processing and check the box next to "Suppress duplicate rows." Again, this won't absolutey fix the problem 100% of the time, but it sometimes fixes most of the problem. That said, if you want to skip this and only use the Excel solution, then that's no problem.

    Thank you Ryan! I didn't know duplicates could be removed in that way- it's exactly the sort of little trick I was hoping for! It's a shame Blackbaud were not able to suggest anything this helpful. 

  • Matt Page
    Matt Page
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Photogenic
    I'd second ticking the "remove duplicates" tick box, and also make sure you have the tick box for attributing soft credits (in one of the next tabs along from the "remove duplicates" one). 


    But also have another think about the query type you are running. It might be worth trying running these as gift queries, only with constituent fields in the output. That should group the correct data together and then if you pick those constituent fields in the pivot table that might be more what you want.

    Hope that helps,


    Matt
  • Catherine Burns
    Catherine Burns
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
    I have this problem too, I am aware of it and of these workarounds to solve it but it does annoy me that Blackbaud drum into us at training and user groups that "queries are for grouping and that exports are for reporting" and then they break their own rules and base the very useful pivot reports on queries instead of exports. I love that pivot reports save the report structure that most of my colleagues do not know how to create from scratch, but if they could be based on exports, that removed the duplicates, they would be so much more powerful.


    If you agree please vote for this in the ideas bank at https://re7.ideas.aha.io/ideas/RE7-I-3416 

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