Password protection in the Volunteer Reporter is set up right inside the Reporter. You can do it yourself. Go to the File menu | Passwords. Click Yes to “Do you want to use passwords when starting the Reporter?”
Then add yourself as the master administrator by clicking Add User. By default every section is set to FULL access. That’s how it should be for the administrator.
After you set the admin user name and password, only a person who logs in with those can get into the Reporter. The administrator then sets up unique users or access-level users who share the same username and password. If you want to add any other users, and/or levels of users, add another user and go through the different sections, changing the access level as desired. When you click on Full, you discover the other levels of Read Only and None.
Users can have read-only, edit [full], or no rights [none] to different sections of the Reporter. Password Area Restrictions:
Volunteers
Stations
Jobs
Placements
Hours
Schedules
Reports
Spreadsheets
Reference Codes
Filters
Web Assistant
Backup
Restore
Reindex Data
Passwords
Preferences [note]
Select Data Set
Delete Old Data
Note: Set the Preferences to either Read Only or None so that a user cannot see or access Field Lists on the File menu.
You can see some screen grabs and learn a bit more about setting passwords in the Help Topics.
- Click on Help
- Help Topics
- Search tab
- Type passwords into the search box.
When you first click on Passwords, you are asked whether or not you want to use passwords. If you don’t want to use passwords no one will be asked for their username and password when starting the Reporter and everyone will have full access to all data and the entire program.
At first, there are no users listed and you need to click on the Add User button. Each user can have their own user name and password. Only you can change either their user name or password which prevents them from choosing simple passwords that might be easy to guess. You can add an unlimited number of users, of course. The default levels are the access given to each section to begin with, but then you can adjust each one.
Access levels for every section of the Reporter can be customized for each user. You can give a user “read only” access to certain parts of the Reporter and no access at all to others sections. It is fully customizable for every user. Read Only access means that a user can look at the data, but not change it. No access means that they can’t even look at the data in that section.
Finally, there are two important facts about passwords you need to know:
- If you forget your password, there is no way to start the Volunteer Reporter.
- Passwords will not protect you from a computer expert who is determined to break into your data.