If you are entering data for a Street Outreach project or other service projects, you would also have recorded each contact you make with clients in a little section called the Current Living Situation. Once all this data is collected, how and where would you access them? Currently, there aren’t any reports within HMIS built specifically for Current Living Situation, but there is a quick workaround using the Program Details…

Have you ever needed a quick count of clients or wondered what their average age is? The average age and more information can be found easily on the Excel Status Bar if properly set up. Set your Status Bar You can find the Status Bar at the bottom of the Excel Spreadsheet; see the orange rectangle below. Right-click on the Status Bar to bring up the ‘Customize Status Bar’ window.…

Dates can be tricky to deal with in Excel. That said, since you need to track when certain things happened in HMIS, it’s helpful to learn how to deal with some of the date functions in Excel in the course of tracking things. For this post, though, we’re just going to learn how to compare a date to today. Let’s say you have 10 active clients, and you are wondering…

In Excel, with Named Ranges you take a range of cells and give it a name. This will make your formulas easier to write and easier to read. Here’s an example. Let’s say you are interested in the ages of the fictional clients below.   All you need to do is highlight the range of cells that have ages in them, go up to the name box in the top…

Excel provides a way to quickly create visualizations and analyze your data in just a few clicks. You don’t have to be an Excel wizard to have tailor-made insights at your fingertips. Here there is a sample set of data to use: Let’s say you have been tasked with identifying how much of each flavor ice cream needed for an office party so you need to find out which flavor…

So you’ve just downloaded the latest homeless data to dive into. Immediately, you noticed that there are a few duplicate entries in your report. So now you wonder, “how many other duplicates are there?” One simple Excel function is available to help you answer that question. Conditional Formatting is a powerful tool that can help you visually explore and analyze your data. You can find this nifty tool under the…

Sometimes spreadsheets can be massive. When approaching a large set of data, arrayed across seemingly endless rows and columns, set in a tiny font that makes you question your optometrist, it can be hard to see how anyone could pull anything meaningful out. Pivot Tables are here to solve that problem. What is a Pivot Table? “A pivot table is a table of statistics that summarizes the data of a more extensive table. This…

Spreadsheets can be daunting without the right tools. Here we will go through a few functions in Excel that will help you quickly find that data point you have been so desperately searching for. Through the sort, filter, and hide functions you can cut out a lot of excess noise. Here we have a small data set. Nothing is in any kind of particular order, but we would really rather…

One of the big questions for any service is “who are we serving?” Luckily, Clarity has a report designed to answer exactly that question. The [OUTS-106] Client Demographics Report is easy to use and even brings along some interesting data visualizations of its own. The Client Demographics Report can be found in the Clarity Reports Library under “Program Based Reports.” You have multiple parameter options available including program type, program…

HMIS houses a lot of data. Every day, users are telling the stories of their hard work and their clients’ journeys through a multitude of text boxes, drop down lists, radial buttons, and toggles. But what can you do with it after it has been entered into the system? Here we will look at the basics of running any report in Clarity: the parameters. Reporting parameters dictate what information you…