CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

There is currently no way to do this using existing "out of the box" functionality. As you've noted, Profiles can't be used to build "event creation" forms. If you have (or have access to) some PHP / developer skills there are a few ways you can potentially accomplish some of what you want:

1. You can create custom versions of the screen template files that are used in event creation. In your customized templates you can hide (or probably just eliminate) the optional fields in each form, and modify the HTML to give you a layout that works better for you. This approach requires only very basic technical / developer skill. Note that if you are looking for a spreadsheet-like interface that allows coaches to add > 1 practice on a single screen this approach will NOT work for you. For more info on customizing screen templates:

http://en.flossmanuals.net/civicrm/ch062_introduction
http://en.flossmanuals.net/civicrm/ch063_templates
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC33/Customizing+CiviCRM+Screens

2. If you need a grid with ability to add multiple events at once you'll need to build a separate module which renders your fields as a grid (perhaps using Drupal's web form builder) and then use CiviCRM api functions to populate the events in the database from your grid. This will require more advanced developer skills. The Extending CiviCRM chapters above should get you started. If you wind up developing a solution for this - please consider sharing your approach and code with the community.

I can probably do the development that Donald mentions and then maybe even the advanced development that David mentions, but it will take so much work and I'm on a tight deadline-  it's just a bit frustrating, after committing to using CiviCRM for many things, that with ALL of the development that's been done with CiviCRM and CiviEvent, this has never come up.  The work of the developers has been good (and apparently they are very sensitive about it) but all the interface work has been for people who can patiently work through long screens with too many fields, rather than there being a few screens out there for rapid datas entry by inexperienced computer users.

Rather than work around the CRM, I'm going to only have time to create a content type in Drupal for Practice Data instead, and competitions.  It will very sadly leave them both out of the event data, but at least I can tell Drupal what fields I want in an entry screen (for the most part- there's title and body, which can be problematic).