Custom Reports in Faculty Success

The beauty of having all of your activities and accomplishments centralized in Faculty Success is that you only have to record something once and the system can do the heavy lifting of bringing the right information together in the right format for you. So when people come asking for information on your activities, accomplishments and qualifications, you can produce up-to-date responses with just a few clicks.

You likely have experience running reports using templates that your college or university has configured for general use across a college or university. These are great for when the institution defines the requirements for how the content is structured and what gets included. But equally, if not more often, you face requests for information on your CV that come from parties external to the university, and you need to create CVs or activity summaries for presentation proposals, grant, award, or sabbatical applications, your personal online profile, and more. In these cases there are often nuanced requirements for how you present your experience, or the documents need your personal touch. Customizing a CV in response to one of these requests can take as much as an hour and a half in a word processor; in Faculty Success it takes ten minutes.

With a few minutes of up-front configuration, you can build tailored templates for the most common requests you get and use them any time you need to produce up-to-date documents that present your work in your preferred format.

Creating Your CV

In configuring your custom CV you’re building a report template that will remember your settings and automatically pull in updated records from Faculty Success each time you open or download a copy of it.

You will have the option to start with a sample CV and make your own modifications as needed, or you may create your own template from scratch. The following instructions will walk you through the tools at your disposal as you configure your CV.

To create your personal CV, navigate to the Reports utility in Faculty Success and select Create a New Report in the top-right corner of the screen. From here, you have two options:

• Vita: Make this selection to start from the sample CV. This is a general, all-purpose CV format, and it may look different from the standard Vita template provided by your university. This option will prove the easiest and fastest way to customize a CV. You can use the standard structure and make minor changes (such as filtering, drag-and-drop to reorder sections, and setting date ranges) to accommodate your needs.
• Blank Document: This allows you to build a CV from scratch. With this option, your personal details will be added to the report for you, along with a sample section to use as a starting point to craft the rest of your report. This option will allow for the most creativity on your part, since you can craft the entire report from the ground up. This may also be useful for ad hoc requests for specific activity data. For instance, you could select this option to quickly generate a list of formatted citations for your recent Publication and Presentation activities.

The "Sections" Structure

Custom CVs are comprised of sections, which are essentially containers to use to group elements of your document together. When you click onto an element of your CV the system will highlight the section it’s in.

There are top-level sections, and then within those you can add one or more Activities or Text sections. The majority of the sections in a CV will be Activities Sections, which contain citations of your data that you’ve entered through the Activities utility.

Previewing Your CV

The customizable CVs feature provides a live preview of how your data will pull into your CV template so you can see the impacts of your changes as you go. The ability to Add and Edit records directly from this view makes it even easier to use these reports as a home base. Instead of navigating the Activities main menu to add and edit records, you can accomplish the data entry alongside the report review.

Please visit the article, Add/Edit Records within Self-Service Reports, for more information on how to use add/edit from this preview.

Reordering Sections

To reorder sections, highlight the section you want to move. On the left side of the section, find the drag-and-drop handle. Select and hold this handle, and drag the section to the appropriate location.

Adding an Activities Section

To pull in citations from a data collection screen you will add an Activities Section to your CV. Just select an existing element in the template, and select the Add Section button. Give the new section an appropriate heading, and select Add Activities.

At this point, you will need to select a Type of activity. The options available for Type will reflect the categories available to you in Activities. Let’s choose "Awards and Honors" and select the check mark icon to confirm your selection. You will notice your Awards and Honors records stored in Faculty Success now appear in the designated section. You will also see a selection of formatting, filtering and grouping options you can apply to this new Activities Section.

If your data is not up-to-date in Activities, some of your accomplishments may be missing from an Activities Section. Suppose you received an award last week, but you didn’t remember to enter it in Activities. Take a moment to save your report template, navigate to Activities, add the new record, and return to your report. If the new record meets your filtering criteria, it will now appear in your customized CV.

Formatting an Activities Section

To add formatting to an Activities Section, click on the block of citations you’d like to format. You will then see a toolbar with formatting options provided, including:

• Display Style
• Table
• Filter
• Group by
• Hanging Indent
• Bulleted List
• Numbered List
• Alignment
• Indent and Outdent

Custom styles for your activities will appear under the Display Style menu. For Publications (Intellectual Contributions), supported citation styles will be available to choose.

To apply your preferred formatting, select an item from the list and click the check mark icon. 

Table Format

Activities may be presented in table format instead of a citation. Selecting the Table Display style from the initial drop down list or from the Display Style tool bar will automatically select the first five fields from the Table list. To make manual column selections, select the Table option and select all columns which should be displayed. Once all selections have been made, select Apply at the bottom of the Table menu to view the results. If no additional changes are required, select the check mark to save.

The width of the report will be the limit for the amount of columns one can add to the table. This means you can add as many columns as you want, but each column is an equal width, sharing the available space on the page.

The ordering of columns is determined by the order of fields on your activity screens. The available options will be similar to those available from Select Columns in the Summary Screen for activities.

Table headers have their own formatting settings located in the Options > Format settings in the report overall. These settings are global to all tables within the current report.

Filtering Activities

You may need to filter the content of some of your Activities Sections:

• To ensure that only citations meeting specific criteria show (e.g., only "accepted" and "published" publications or only "peer-reviewed/refereed" items)
• To override the global CV date range for a specific section, like your degrees

To apply filters to an Activities Section, click on the section of citations you wish to filter. This will reveal a toolbar with a Filter option. Expand this menu and select your filters. Then select the check mark icon to apply them.

Grouping Activities

You may also want to change how activities are grouped within a section. To dictate how records should be grouped, select an Activities Section and select a field under Group By. This list is based on the drop-down list fields available for a given screen.

When applying a group to a section which is using the table format option, the table will be split based on the selected group value.

A Scheduled Teaching activity section formatted as a table, with the group option splitting the table by Term and Year

Adding a Text Section

You may also add Text Sections to your report when you need to include subheadings, annotations, or a summary of your activities. To do this, highlight an existing section and select Add Text.

A free-text box will appear for you to add any appropriate notes. You also have a few rich text formatting options like bold, underline, and italicize.

Keep in mind that Text Sections should not be used to enter activity records that do not appear in an Activities Section. If you enter an activity record as text within your customized CV, that record will not be available for all of your reports. Take a moment to add or update this record in Activities so it will always be available in other reports and CV templates.

Adjusting the Report Date Range

You also have the ability to adjust the date range for your CV template. For instance, you can create one CV template to reflect the last year’s worth of activities, and you can have a second template to reflect three years’ worth of activities.

In the top-right corner of your report preview, you will see an Options tab. Select this tab, and you will be presented with some additional buttons. Select Date Range, which displays a pane with the following options:

• All Dates (default): This selection will include all of your activities from Activities.
• Start Date and End Date: This option allows you to define a specific date range for the report.
• Undated records: Choose whether to include activities that do not have a date entered.

NOTE: You also have the option to override the report-level date setting on a section-by-section basis. Suppose you want most of your sections to be limited to a year’s worth of activities, but you want to include all of your "Degrees" or "Education" records. In this case, you would set the Start Date and End Date appropriately within the Options tab. Then you would, adjust the filters on the Activities Section with the citations for your degrees. See Filtering Activities for more details on how to do this.

Setting Fonts and Header Formatting

Similar to how you can set global document styles in a word processor, you can set fonts and header formats at the document level. You can access these options via the Format Text button in the Options pane.

Here, you can specify the fonts for the body text, as well as the headings. Below the font selections, you can also adjust some style options like bold, alignment, and indentation for each of the heading levels available.

Saving Your Report

Keep in mind that once you’ve built a report template, you can use that template infinitely. In order to do that, you need to save the report. To save, simply select the Save button in the top-right corner of the screen. You will be prompted to name the report before saving. Make sure you give the template a unique name, since it will appear among your list of available reports in the Reports utility.

Each time you open the report, it will remember the ordering, filtering, and settings from the last time you saved the template, but it will refresh with any new records or updates that have been entered in Activities.

Exporting Your Report

When a request for your information comes in, you can use your custom CV(s) to produce the document to provide in response. Just select your preferred CV template in the Reports menu. When it opens you’ll see it automatically pulls in all of the relevant information in the format you configured. Then you can export a copy of this document to share with the requestor.

To export your custom CV, open the Options tab within the Report Builder. There are two Export options:

• PDF: This will download a non-editable version of your CV in PDF format.
• Word: This will download a copy of your CV in Microsoft Word format.

The Blank Sections toggle controls whether sections with no data should appear in the exported copy of your CV. Confirm this setting before you choose your output format.

Exporting Your Report for a Group of Users

Suppose you've just built an annual activity report, and you want to share that formatted data with an external audience. The "Export For Group" feature allows you to do that.

To select users for whom to export your report, first select the scope, then select an option within that scope, and click "Add". Each time you add a selection, it will appear in the list below.

You can also remove selections, or individuals within a selection, using the trash can icon.

Once you have finalized your selections, you can export using PDF or Word format. When exporting reports for multiple users, Faculty Success will generate a .zip file containing one PDF or Word document for each individual user, based on your selections.

Duplicating or Rename Your Report Template

Once you have configured a CV, you may want to create a different version with minor adjustments. Instead of creating another report from scratch or from the sample template, you can make a copy of your customized CV and make any necessary adjustments to the resulting duplicate.

To duplicate a CV, navigate to the Reports menu. Locate the template that you want to copy. To the right of your saved template, you will find an arrow in the Actions column. Select the arrow, and select the Duplicate option from the drop-down list. At this point you will be prompted to name the duplicated report. Give this report a name that will help you easily identify it from your list of reports, and select Duplicate.

To rename a CV, navigate to the Reports menu. Locate a CV that you have created and saved. To the right of your report, you will find an arrow in the Actions column. Select the arrow, and select the Rename option from the drop-down list. Enter a new name for the report, and select Rename.