I’d really like to have a canned report from Scoutbook listing who can tent with whom, based on birthdays and the YPT requirement that scouts be no more than two years apart in age.
Example:
Mike C Can tent with: Tommy B, Jimmy H, Frankie C
Cannot tent with: Stephen S, Jonas M, Joey B
I can do it by hand (which is what we do now) but it would be really nice to have this available when new scouts join the troop.
I have added this to the backlog.
Thanks! (Additionalmeaniglesstext)
Steve - cool name by the way and i concur on the additionalmeaninglesstext…but in the end this forum set is a huge step ahead.
Indeed the date of birth/age sort is a huge step forward.
To be sure. I hope the future updates (calendar and messaging) are as good as the forum update has been.
To be honest the amount of progress in the past few months has been outstanding. To be able to retire IA and present a new report builder means that there is traction for user requests. I will certainly say that this is good.
Yep. I haven’t looked at the new report builder very much yet, but just being able to make a custom report and share it instead of telling people what fields to pick is huge.
Yup…you may want to give it a test drive as it may well give you what you want for tenting limitations.
Will take a better look at it tomorrow morning
Steve,
While waiting for the requested report, you can extract the data you need to do the analysis with Report Builder.
Since Scouts are sorted by age, you can quickly figure out which Scouts can share a tent.
After running the report, you can export a csv of the results and use Excel, Google Sheets, etc. to format the data other ways.
That’s what I did, and what gave me the idea for the canned report. The whole thing came up this week at summer camp, since most of our older scouts didn’t camp with the troop. We ended up with one scout that’s over 2 years older than all but two of the campers. It was a big pain trying to get it all sorted out on a cell phone screen.
Steve,
The report I speced would be a grid (kind of like a mileage distance table) with X where Scouts can tent together. I’ll add an option to produce a single list of Scout names with their DOB next to them sorted by DOB so it works on a mobile device too.
I think the grid would be a great visualization of the data. I had not even considered that as an option. Thank you!
Here’s a matrix I cobbled together in Excel that anyone interested can use (it’s got dummy data to show how the formulas work). Plug in the scout names and birthdays from the report builder, and you’ll get green boxes for the scouts that can camp together…
Providing the matrix seems likely to maximize the time it will take to get everyone assigned to a tent. Just putting the Scouts in order of age and assigning them in that order (e.g., 1st 3 Scouts in the 1st 3 person tent) will be the most workable for each patrol or troop (our troop is small, so we have to go with the whole troop to meet the age requirement and avoid one Scout in a tent). If you don’t have a custom report available, the SPL can just tell the Scouts to line up in order of age and then physically hand the 1st tent to the 1st 3 Scouts (checking for 2 years max as he goes down the line), etc.
The matrix let’s you get that done before you show up at the campsite. We have a couple gaps where lining up the boys by age won’t cut it.
We need to provide the info to the Scouts so they can pick who they can tent with and meet the policy. We need not dictate to them who they tent with as long as the policy is met.
That’s… the point of the matrix. Let the boys know who they can tent with, and also give the leaders on the trip a quick reference to make sure YPT rules are being followed.
I prefer to let the Scouts figure it out by reminding them they may not tent with someone more than 2 years younger or older. They typically know the ages of the other Scouts in the troop better than the leaders.
For larger Troops it would be helpful if this report sorted/grouped the Scouts also by patrol. We only have 3 patrols for most of the year (new Scout patrol goes away after 9 months or so) but still try to camp by patrol at every outing.
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