Gradebook

I've been using Moodle for a long time and what I've always wished for is to have grades from different categories appear on different worksheets in Excel. In fact, after downloading grades, I usually manually chop them up into different worksheets.

It seems to me that the Moodle 1.9 Excel export will let us choose which grades to download, so in a way, my manual chopping can be replaced by a few downloads plus a few copy and pastes.

I've looked into the Moodle code and noticed that:

1. it is very easy to make and write into different worksheets when exporting grades in Excel. One only needs to change the file /grade/export/xls/grade_export_xls.php.
I got this to work.

2. The file /grade/export/xls/grade_export_xls.php does not seem to use the classes that deal with the grade tree, as opposed to file that prints the report on the screen
/grade/report/grader/index.php, so getting the first level grade categories might be tricky.

Although a lot of work has been done on Moodle workbook, I still find it way easier to download raw grades into a spreadsheet and calculate my grades there. It might be because the new 1.9 grade book seems complicated or because I feel extremely comfortable with Excel. My institutions also requires me to submit a hard copy of all the grades, which is easily done by printing out my nicely formatted spreadsheet.

I would like to know if the community feels that it is worthwhile improving the spreadsheet export. This would include exporting data into different worksheets and exporting formulas whenever possible.

Tamara