The Most Important Thing – Unique Class Names
If you take only one thing from reading this, I want you to remember this very important thing – Each Class name, whether it is a short or formal class name, MUST be unique.
Why? you might wonder – When the student has two classes with the same name, formulas that lookup lesson plans and other items based on the class name will not work properly.
- Formal Class Names are the class names that appear on the reports.
- Short Class Names can appear on the lesson planners and they appear on the Today worksheet.
The short class names are automatically generated, and you can control the number of characters that are displayed. The number shown in the image below, “3”, is the control. Enter a larger or smaller number to alter the short class names. Please keep the number small, ideally less than 9.
Later, if you see that the short class name is too long for the planners, you can always return to the worksheet where this is set up and change it.
To make things a little easier for you, I added a formula to alert you if any of the class names are the same.
Why short class names?
The short class names exist because sometimes the real class names are too long for the lesson planners. In addition to the lesson planners, and as of this writing, the short names also appear on the Today worksheet.
What if the short class name is not good?
Automation is not always good. If one of the short class names is not good or if it makes identical class names, then you may replace the automated name with a better short name. IN DOING SO, the formula will be lost in the cell, and in this case, overwriting the automatic short class name formula will not break the planner.
