Tips and Tricks 3 – The More You Know…

Posted by to Altru on May 9th, 2011

A brief History lesson

Ever curious about who put that record into Altru and when? Or maybe when you accidentally clicked delete instead of edit for that high profile donor’s address, you wished there were a way to see the record’s history to know what was changed? Well today’s your lucky day!

If you’re viewing certain types of records in the database, such as constituents or revenue records, click on the “History” link under the more information section. You’ll be able to see a variety of information regarding the record’s changes such as the date changed, action, user who adjusted it, and the before and after field values for each field:

Remember, you can also find the most recent values for these related fields in query if you wanted to aggregate data. They can be filtered on or simply pulled into the output. For example, you may want to create a Sales Order query of all the orders entered by “x” username for a certain date. Simply choose the “Added by user name” and “Date added” fields as your filters. Note that these fields are always found under the “System Fields” section in the middle pane:

Adjusting Column Header Names from Query and Export

We know that query and export are excellent tools and often times you simply would like to export data directly from your results. The problem is that sometimes you may not be so fond of the name of the output field, which creates the name of your column heading in your exported file. For example, if you use the Summarize feature in query and are filtering on your Board Members’ annual giving, SUM(Amount) just doesn’t look quite as neat and pretty as “Annual Giving 09-11” for your spreadsheet.

For this reason, we’ve allowed you the option to change the column heading so that when it exports the column name it will look just the way you want it to. Simply right-click on the output field, roll over “Change Column Heading,” and you may enter text in the field beside it:

Don’t forget that you can rename column headings in any Export Definitions you create by completing the same steps as well!




  • Kim

    I can’t find the history! Can you explain “click on the “History” link under the more information section” in a bit more detail? I’m in RE on a constituent record and don’t see a “more information” section or “History” link. Help!

  • Sarah Mcbride

    Kim, sorry for the confusion! This post is specific to our arts and cultural product, Altru. I’ve updated the first paragraph to indicate the product.

  • Kim

    Well that explains it! Any chance we could get this feature in RE?

  • Sarah Mcbride

    Good news is that The Raiser’s Edge has a similar feature–you can select File,
    Properties to see when a record was added/changed and which user modified the
    record. :) Take a look at BB88196 –
    http://www.blackbaud.com/kb/index?page=content&id=BB88196

  • Kim

    True, but what’s frustrating is I can’t see WHAT was changed by another staffer! And since I don’t know all of our 70,000 records by heart, I can’t usually tell. Sigh.

  • Chad

    Great link Sarah!

  • Scott Barnes

    I read this article after the first paragraph was updated to include the word “Altru”. When I read that, I had no idea what it meant so just skipped over it, read the whole article, tried to find the “History” link, and looked back over the article headings to see if this was specific to some other product. I knew about many of Blackbaud’s other products, but had never heard of Altru before.

    I’d suggest making this clarification a little more obvious — maybe in the article’s title (like “Tips & Tricks for Altru product”).

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