A major advantage of an online portal like ACEweb is that your users can now do things on their own that used to require staff involvement.  All you need to do is wait for the registration notices to come in. That’s great, but sometimes a little background detail might be useful.

There are several features on the ACEweb Administration Page that can provide more information about what your web users are up to.

A couple of caveats:

Also note that many of these features will be covered in detail at the Conference – watch for the session on, “The Improved ACEweb Activity Log.”

Contributed by Stein Goering

As a result of last month's reminder about the annual consultation available with your SMA, we had some consultations scheduled. But, not nearly enough. This annual check up is so important to your team! Expect to hear from Susan if your renewal was January - April 2021 and we didn't meet with you! Not a single program has regretted the hour with us! All have appreciated the answers to questions and solutions for improved workflow. Let's get your consultation scheduled!

Contributed by Sharon Brookshire

We are so excited to see you at conference this year! The agenda for the week is finalized and posted!

If you have registered, you will receive a conference goodie box by mail! We know some of you continue to work from home, so please send an email sharing where we should send your box! (This is a way for me to see who is reading our newsletter vs. whom I have to track down!) Also, you will be receiving an email about how to prepare and participate in the conference.

If you haven't registered, what's holding you back? Come join the learning and the fun! In 2021 we have:

More Content - You will have some breakout sessions to select from. I know, choices, choices. The good news is we will record all the sessions and make the recording available.

Small Group Discussions - Last year, attendees missed the time to visit with their peers. We fixed that! Tuesday, June 8 and Wednesday, June 9, you will have the opportunity to select from three different discussion groups.

Fun Learning Opportunity with Prizes! You'll have to register to participate.

Seats remain in our two pre-conference workshops (Creating Supplemental Data Pages and Basics of Report Writing). If you have already registered for conference and wish you had signed up for a pre-conference workshop, send me an email! I'll get a workshop added to your registration.

Contributed by Sharon Brookshire

One of the great things about Student Manager is that it is VERY good at finding information that exists. In other words, if the data exists, it can be discovered/found/reported.

However, the challenge is in finding stuff that DOES NOT exist!

In Continuing Education, you often want to know:

While it does require a bit of setup, Student Manager allows you to find the haystacks that DO NOT have a needle inside.

The secret sauce is: The Names Report Flag.

The basic process here is to mark the names report flag (set it to .T. or ON) for those names who HAVE taken X course(s) or who DO have the Y Interest code.

This can be done by using the Set Filter Tool.

NOTE:  Before we go into the Set Filter side, you should first go to Tools / Data Filters / Remove Filter / Names, and make sure you CLEAR any old (from some prior flagging operation) flags from the names table. Once you’ve done that, you are ready to proceed.

From the main menu, go to: Tools / Data Filters / Set Filter for Editing. While the primary use for the Set Filter area is to set a particular file (Names, Courses, Registrations) to APPEAR like there are only certain records in the file (eg., If you only wanted to see/look up/report Courses where the coordinator is, “Havlicek”). One of the options when going through the set filter procedure is to flag name records (by setting the Report Flag or Print Label Flag field to .T.). And then you can abandon the filtering on Course or Register or one of the other options.

So, if you wanted to find out which students have NOT enrolled in a class for the current semester, you would go into the Set Filter for Editing/Courses. You’ll get a Query Manager tool (the standard one used in report queries). Pick a query that would pull the class(es) that you want to know which students DID NOT take. So if you want to know what students did not take classes in Spring 21, it’d be Course Number = ‘21S’ (if using suggested Manager coding). When you run the query, you’ll be presented with a choice (see image 1 below).

You would pick: “Flag REPORT LABEL”

You’ll get a couple of message boxes telling you about prior flag operations, if you want to “Count” cancelled reggies, and then finally be presented a box (see image 2 below).

You’d typically check YES (assuming you don’t really want the course filter).

Now, what you’ve done is flag EVERY name in the database that is/was enrolled in a Spring Course.

Whew: Done with step 1

Step 2:

Now that we know which names ARE enrolled (the name Report Flag is .T.), you can go to any name reporting area (Mailing Labels, Names w/Codes, etc.) and set up a query:

Name Report Flag is FALSE (and any other name filtering option you might want).

When you run that, you will get all names that ARE NOT/WERE NOT enrolled in a Spring 2021 class.

In this second step (the set filter/query for names) you will typically only want to compare a selected set of names. i.e.: Names added AFTER a date? Names with a specific Interest code? Names from a particular City? Zip Code? Etc. So you’d have a query that is:

Name Report Flag = .F. AND Nmcity = < ask later >

SO, there you go. How to use the Report Flag to find people who AREN’T/WEREN’T there!

Contributed by Chuck Havlicek

PS from Sharon! Chuck will discuss this as well as other report functions at conference.

You can use the field chactive to display a T or F for active, and you can use the field marked to show if they are set to display on ACEweb. This can be very handy when working with building courses, especially new courses where you want to get the correct grouping codes set. It also makes for a great thing to have printed and posted in your office!

Contributed by Joseph Sotkovski