Viewing multiple rotas in a single report

It's often helpful to be able to visualise an overview of multiple rotas, perhaps all the rotas linked to a particular Service - either for a range of dates or perhaps to know what's happening this weekend. That's where the rota Overview report helps. The Overview is fully editable, meaning that you can visualise and make changes across multiple rotas from within the report.

You can access the report using the Overview action at the top of the Rotas list...

As seen in the example below, the report can be filtered for a single date or range of Dates and selected Ministries, Rotas, Roles and Services, perhaps selecting to only see those serving on a particular day of the week (default is "any" day) or those on rotas for a particular service.

You can optionally Order the report results by rota member Name or by Role and Group [the results] by Time, Date or Service. You can also choose whether the report starts each new rota date on a new page or shows empty dates - ideal for spotting if a ministry doesn't have a rota yet! You can also show a rota members table of contact details at the end of the report, which will respect the privacy settings of each rota member.

Click Generate to apply filter changes and view the results.

The Overview shows rota notes at the top of each respective rota in the results but service notes, which apply to all rotas for a service, are only shown if the report filters are set to Group by Service.

You can Communicate to those people in the report results by email or SMS; or use Send report to forward the report by email to another person:

You can also Download the report as a CSV or PDF or Print report:

Note that the Print report option works best when the rotation is set to Landscape in the print preview settings. It may also be necessary to adjust other printer settings in the print preview to get the report to render more elegantly - this is wholly dependent on the printer. As an alternative, use the Download PDF option to render the report correctly, download it to your desktop and print it from there. Please note the PDF download will always split multiple dates to separate pages, regardless of whether the 'Print dates on separate pages' option is unchecked or not.

When you Download the Overview to a CSV format file, clashes and unavailability are distinguished by symbols in front of the rota member's name (!! for Clash and -- for Unavailable) - colour and strikethrough text formatting are not possible when exporting CSV files. The downloaded CSV file can be viewed and further manipulated in popular spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers. The Overview CSV is always sorted by rota member Name order only - it is not possible to download a CSV format file sorted in Role order.

Note: In Microsoft Excel on a Mac, multi-line rows in CSV files often render as just a single line visible per row (with a row height of 16px), meaning that other lines in the row are not readily apparent or appear missing when in fact they are only hidden by the row height. Selecting the entire spreadsheet and then selecting Format > Rows > Auto-fit reveals the concealed content. This issue only happens in Excel, not in Apple Numbers.