Grouping mechanism
Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 10:17 pm
I evaluated Donor Manager some time ago as a replacement for my own Access-based contraption. I say "contraption" because I was constantly having to fix, tweak or otherwise spend time changing it every time I needed something new. Donor Manager does virtually everything I need or could want...except letting me make relational ad-hoc groupings of donors for trip planning or other purposes requiring an explicit selection of individual donors.
Yes, I could commandeer a user-defined flag and create a related filter to accomplish the same purpose, but after ten such groupings I have to start throwing away previous groupings to accomodate new ones because the "flat" way it would have to be done is quite limited (there are only 10 user-defined check-mark fields). My existing database does this kind of grouping (though it was implemented "cheaply" and I got what I paid for), but I have become quite dependent upon it.
My transition to DM would be instantaneous if DM could [1] be given a way to create any number of named "Groups" (with related Description) and then [2] be able to manually place one or more contacts into any Group, and then additionally [3] be able to restrict the donor set for reports, labels, data export and other operations via Groups like they can already be restricted by Filters.
It could be that this has been added to DM since my evaluation a year ago that fulfills my wish or is done some better way, but I don't know that. What do you think?
Yes, I could commandeer a user-defined flag and create a related filter to accomplish the same purpose, but after ten such groupings I have to start throwing away previous groupings to accomodate new ones because the "flat" way it would have to be done is quite limited (there are only 10 user-defined check-mark fields). My existing database does this kind of grouping (though it was implemented "cheaply" and I got what I paid for), but I have become quite dependent upon it.
My transition to DM would be instantaneous if DM could [1] be given a way to create any number of named "Groups" (with related Description) and then [2] be able to manually place one or more contacts into any Group, and then additionally [3] be able to restrict the donor set for reports, labels, data export and other operations via Groups like they can already be restricted by Filters.
It could be that this has been added to DM since my evaluation a year ago that fulfills my wish or is done some better way, but I don't know that. What do you think?