1st Class GradeBook grades files are actually Microsoft Access
database files and as such can be read by any report writer
of your choosing which supports Microsoft Access (which is all
report writers that we know of). The only thing you need to be
aware of is that you must go into the gradebook and run a report
(any report) to ensure that all the summary level
information/tables have been recalculated after any changes to
the grades or settings relavent to grades.
1st Class Gradebook itself uses a third party report writer called
Crytal Reports. In particular we use Crystal Reports ver. 2
which shipped with Visual Basic version 3. We should also mention
that there is a patch for this version which we can provide if
necessary. We have decided not to upgrade to the new versions of
Crystal Reports because the distribution size of our application
would go from 2.7MB to over 10MB making internet distribution too
slow and unreliable for the bulk of our cusomters. If you need
to aquire this version please contact us. Using Crystal Reports has
the advantages of allowing you to take an existing report and modify
it to suite your needs.
Another alternative is to use the latest version (or the version
you currently have) of Crystal Reports and modify our reports. Since
you are likely to be using a version other than version 2, once you
modify the reports they will no longer run from inside 1st Class
GradeBook. For this reason we recommend you save the modified reports
under a different file name leaving the original files untouched.
You can run the reports from the report writer. Be sure you run one
report from inside 1st Class GradeBook to force a grade recalculation.
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