Create a "big board" of Unit advancement report suitable to bring to a printer

Scoutbook New Scoutbook Feature Requests
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Our unit periodically creates at a banner where Scouts can see their advancement in a big matrix. It motivates Scouts to keep up with their piers. We use the historian to occasionally update the matrix by checking off boxes for the recently completed advancement (most often when a rank is completed).

There are built-in reports for showing advancement in a matrix, but they are rather clunky and filled with white space which makes comparisons challenging. They are fine if you need dates, etc., but often we just want a checkbox in a table quickly showing progress.

What I’d love to see is a unit wide matrix with names listed down the row labels (by patrol, and whatever sort order you want - proper DoB, alphabetically, etc.). The column headings are by rank requirement (number and brief description), organized by rank. The intersections are squares with checkboxes indicating earned or blank if not.

Right now, it is an assemblage of different reports. This one should be a basic report which easily identifies where Scouts have general holes in advancement in a glance or can easily see their progress without having to mess around with CSV files, text alignment to keep the box sizes compact, etc.

Honestly, if Scouting America made this report appealing enough, visually, Scout Shops could offer it as a product to units with a reasonably markup (Staples offers banner printing).

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@KennethCrannell that info can be easily generated using Report Builder by leaders with access.

1 Like
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I am a leader with access. It is rather tedious to generate, assemble, and post-process in such a manner, especially unit-wide.
I wouldn’t have written this request unless I hadn’t just spent a great deal of time trying create such report for my unit. The frustration in not being able to create something readily was a topic of discussion among a number of Scoutmasters recently.

(I’ve tested software for embedded systems for decades).

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Most printshops can convert a pdf to a format pretty fast and even editable now - I just tested it and did it in under 30 secs. There is no such thing as a banner size, and it is that open variable which is a show stopper.

I can also convert and use the CSV pretty easily.

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@KennethCrannell

You can almost get what you want except for the 250 column limit currently in Report Builder. I have requested this be removed.

I have also asked for the ability to group by patrol then sort by either DOB, LN or FN as today you can’t sort by patrol then DOB for example.

If you select Show Empty Requirements, all of your Scouts and all the ranks and rank requirements you get all the desired data.

Until the column restriction is lifted, you would have to dump the data to a CSV then rotate it so the names are in column 1 and the reqs in row 1.

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I’ve messed around with different sorting, use the show empty requirements, generated CSVs, removed dates from completed requirements to replace with a check mark, etc.

Not hard, tedious. The point is a feature request to make it direct and simple in a comparatively compact format. We’ve had more visitors from other units positively comment on our “big board” and wished that Scoutbook+ could generate something similar for them.

Once I get the data in, I just create a PDF from the Excel spreadsheet and drop into Staples, choose the best banner size and get a banner.

I get there’s probably a ton of other pressing items with more urgent priority. And I get, I’m probably still trying to shed my Scoutbook familiarity to features and trying to find things in Scoutbook+ that are implemented differently.

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I’ll send you a private message so you can provide an example. Look for a green envelope on top of the green circle with white K in the upper right corner of your forum window.

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