I'm a huge fan of the data slicer and saving reports. We've realized that it is an excellent way to create dynamic, accurate mailing lists (for example, "All Freshman Students in X Department") that will stay accurate if something changes (for example, if a student drops out or changes their major).
There are, however, two major downsides:
1) Only people with sufficient permissions to use the Data Slicer can see these reports.
2) We can only generate reports on students and not on faculty.
Now, there is the Mailing List feature, but obviously the filtering available there is paltry compared to the Data Slicer. In fact, the filtering there is just this side of useless.
I have discovered it is possible to add tags based on Data Slicer searches, which makes it possible to then create Mailing Lists based on those tags, but this is only half a solution at best because then we'd have to manually remove the tags from any users who later change status and should not be part of that list. It's a method of filtering ripe for human error.
Another downside of the Mailing Lists is that they are static. For example, if I create a mailing list based on a tag and then remove that tag from a user, that user will still be listed on the mailing list. Data Slicer reports, by contrast, are dynamic.
In an ideal world, what I would love to see is:
1) The ability to save Data Slicer reports as dynamic Mailing Lists viewable by everyone.
2) The ability to search for faculty and staff using the Data Slicer
If those features are not possible, then it would be extremely useful to be able (somehow—using the Mailing List feature or some other way) to create dynamic, emailable lists accessible to everybody of the following groups:
- All active students in a given department
- All active students in a given cohort
- All active students in a given cohort in a given department
- All current faculty teaching at least one class in a given department
- All faculty who has ever taught at least one class in a given department
I want these lists to update themselves as things change, so using tags won't work.
It's frustrating because I get requests all the time from faculty who just assume that Populi can do this because intuitively it seems like it should. All the data is there.
Is this possible and I'm missing it?
Thank you.
