Summary: Status by Date Started Report

Start out with the built-in report Volunteer Counts by Active Status and Date Started.

Click on Summary/Crosstab from the Reports panel. Then select Volunteer Counts by Active Status and Date Started.

On the left we have the Report title, an Initial source of people (meaning that people will be the basis for the report/the records we summarize will be people), and any filters on the people themselves. To the right are the fields we're working with:

• The columns of the report will be the various active statuses of people.
• Rows will be the year that each person started. Note the "*" at the beginning of that field: it means that Date started year is a calculated field.
• Summarized fields is the count of unique people (their codes).

To print the results,

1. Set your filters.
2. Choose the column fields, row fields, and summarized fields.
3. Select an output file to create (VSys makes an Excel file), then click Export.

Calculated Fields

This report needed a calculated field to work: if we just used the person's Date started, we'd get one row for January 1st, 1991, another for January 2nd, 1991, etc., when we want a single row for each year. To do this we clicked on Calculated fields and defined a new field. The Source field here is the person's Date started, and we gave the field a name. Then we added the operation "Year portion of date", which takes - for any date field - just the year portion. Someone who started on January 4th of 1989 and another who started October 31st of 1989 would both have the Date started year value of 1989.