An easier way to download your data?

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  • Cindy K
    Member

    On the future features list there is an item listed as “An easier way to download your data”. This seems to indicate that there already is SOME way of downloading your data, but it’s just not “easy”. I have never seen an option to do this so far? Is there a way to “download” or “export” your data into some kind of format? 

    I would LOVE a way to export my list of resources for all those that I have entered or are using in the Scheduler! That would make it  much easier to create my own report of courses with corresponding resources without having to re-enter all of my resource data. I don’t think the printed version of the Summary Report is very professional looking – just a non-styled version of the web page. I would want something a little more polished-looking for me records.

    Thanks,

    Doug Smith
    Keymaster

    It’s not truly downloading your data but we often recommend printing to a PDF if you want to keep an electronic copy of your records. I realize that’s not even close to what you would like, though.

    We originally thought about including some sort of export feature but realized it would never be used by the majority of CM Organizer users. It’s still on the list as something that would be nice, but I have to admit it’s pretty low priority compared to many of the other items.

    That said, if we found there was a lot of interest in it we would certainly reconsider the priority.

    We are always interested in adding other reports if they would be useful to enough users. We’ve only added the obvious useful ones so far, so if you have some better report ideas feel free to let us know. If anyone feels like sending sketches or examples you can e-mail them directly to me at doug@ the name of this site.

    Lisa
    Participant

    It would actually be useful to be able to download the data. I had to file an end of year learning summary for our umbrella school. The reports were very helpful so I could easily see what we covered. However, I had to re-type all the titles into another document to submit the learning summary. It would have been nice to be able to copy and paste that information. Similarly, I need to file a learning plan for the up coming school year. Since I already have the resources entered into the CM Organizer, it would be great to just copy and paste those in, too. 

    Could you make a new report with unfinished assigments/resources? Something that would tell what is coming up in the school year? Perhaps it would be useful to check every couple of months to see how on track I am with getting items accomplished during the school year, and adjusting our pace as needed. 

    Thank you.

    Lisa

     

    suzukimom
    Participant

    Hm, I have copy and pasted reports into Word – don’t remember if I did it from my browser, or from a pdf…. 

    I submitted my changes back here (to thei customer support) as suggestions for a new report, including comments on what I’d changed, and what I would use the report for…

    Cindy K
    Member

    Hm, I have copy and pasted reports into Word – don’t remember if I did it from my browser, or from a pdf….

    How do you do PDF reports from the Organizer? I have never seen that option. The only way I could see to to it is to have a program like CutePDF which installs itself as a printer and “print” to the PDF printer. When I do that, the reports come out kind of ugly, even compared to the view on the webpage.

    Since I already have the resources entered into the CM Organizer, it would be great to just copy and paste those in, too.

    Even if you were just able to “export” all of your completed resources including some of the details like title, author, copyright date, and maybe ISBN, (anything else?) into a .CSV file, it would become VERY flexible for those of us who want to use the data without having to re-type it into another format! Smile

    I sent an example PDF I created from another program to Doug as he requested in his post with comments about what I like and disliked about the report. At least the report was a good starting point for generating report ideas. I would love to see your idea, suzukimom, if there were a way to do that through the forum or PMs!

    Great input, everyone!

    Doug Smith
    Keymaster

    Thanks for the good feedback and samples. That helps a lot to understand what would be useful. I’m collecting everyone’s comments and example reports into one place so we can consider those when we tackle more reports. Feel free to continue to send ideas and examples anytime.

    We have a few things in progress now that we need to finish up before we can likely tackle more reports, though. We’re working through the division numbering enhancements now and then we need to finish sharing resources. And after that we have a surprise feature that we think everyone will love.

    @Lisa, Are you required to submit your summary in a particular required format? You mentioned that it would have been nice to be able to copy and paste. Did you try that with the report on the screen? I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work.

    @Cindy, Yes, you would need to use something like CutePDF on Windows to save a PDF. Mac users can use their built-in print to PDF. The quality of your printed reports and PDF are partially controlled by your Web browser software. Internet Explorer does not support many of the print formatting commands so we have less control there. You might test it in FireFox or Chrome and see if there’s a difference.

    suzukimom
    Participant

    Hi Cindy,

    Not sure if I still have my sample new report available…. 

    Basically it was a report that would be in-between the detailed and the summary….    It had the stuff that was finished, but it had stuff that had been worked on, but not finished too…

     

     

    Doug Smith
    Keymaster

    We just rolled out some printing improvements to the summary and detail reports. We got rid of the extra blank space between lines, removed the links for “print this report”, etc. on the print version, made the indenting more obvious, and stopped division titles from being forced to all lower case.

    Try them out and let us know what you think.

    Cindy K
    Member

    Thank you, Doug. The reports look much cleaner and easier to read now.

    I have found that I can use LibraryThing.com to provide a detailed resource listing of books (only). All I have to enter is the ISBN or title search, add it to my library, and assign tags to it to help me filter my listing for specific resource printouts. Still requires duplicating data entry compared to being able to print a resource listing for the year from here, but provides me many more options for how much information to display.

    Doug Smith
    Keymaster

    We do register all our books at LibraryThing.com so at least you don’t have to enter the details. 🙂 I’ll have to take a look at their reports and see what they offer.

    I’m interested in how you filter your lists. If we had a report that showed resources you have scheduled how would you want to break it down? By student?

    We do have on our features list the ability to create personal lists of resources. They would be sort of like tags, only private. How much would that help?

    Cindy K
    Member

    We do have on our features list the ability to create personal lists of resources. They would be sort of like tags, only private. How much would that help?

    That would be cool, as long as we could get a report listing of all of our “personal resources”, complete with title, author, publish or copyright date, and ISBN. And extra nicety would be a filter for only those resources used in the current school year (or optionally, last school year.)

    Or take your Summary Report, allow me to group by subject rather than student (maybe make the student grouping and the corresponding completed assignments listed optional for those who also want a listing of completion by student) and include more details about the resource than just its title – author, copyright or publish date, ISBN. I’m on the fence as to whether to include completion dates in this report, but at least a listing of all resources used would be great.

    Since I have fraternal twins who are, for the most part, doing all of the same subjects, I use the tags at LibraryThing.com for each “course”. We are using Trail Guide to Learning: Paths of Settlement for our core this year. It revolves around US History, and includes our literature, art, science, some music, and most of our language arts. So I have a tag called “Trail Guide to Learning”, then I add in “7th grade” as a tag since we used TGTL last year as well (Paths of Exploration), then on specific resources I will add “literature”, “US History”, “science”, or other such tag to further filter within the TGTL tag.

    Thank you for pursuing this.

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