Tip of the Week October 29, 2012

Include volunteer names on ‘child’ records in Excel reports

In databases, a “child” record is a piece of information that relates back to one particular record. For example, one volunteer record can have multiple service entries (or records). In this case, the service entries are child records of the volunteer record. An easy way to think of this is that in real life one parent can have multiple children.

In Volgistics, Excel Spread Sheet reports are designed to contain detailed volunteer information such as all of a volunteer’s child records. These may include things like service and schedule entries, and Checklist and Award dates. This makes it necessary to create different worksheets, or tabs, within the Excel workbook to contain the child records. Help topic 2165 explains more about how this works.

The volunteer’s child records are linked back to the parent record using the volunteer number. This can be confusing because it is difficult to see at a glance which volunteer the child record relates to. However, you can select to also include the volunteer’s name in the child records to help you use the report’s information more easily. To do this, check the “Include volunteer names in ‘child’ records” box on the Options tab when you create the Excel report. Using this option will make the report include the volunteer’s name, as well as the volunteer’s number, on each row that has a child record for the volunteer.

Leave a Reply