A Sharp Report, Part 2:  Sections

November 2003

Scott Holmes
ACT! Certified Consultant
Cornerstone Solutions, Inc.

Continued...

Adding and Modifying Sections

Adding new sections is a simple task, as is removing an unwanted section. To add a section to a report, follow these steps:

1. Create a new report or edit an existing Report Template.

2. Choose Edit | Define Sections from the report designer menu (you can also right-click anywhere on the report itself and choose Define Sections). The Define Sections dialog box will display (see Figure 3).

3. Select the existing section above or below which you want to add a section.

4. Click the Add button to display the Add Section dialog box (see Figure 4). If the type of section you want to add is “grayed out” (not available), either you selected the incorrect section in Step 3, or it’s not a valid section type for this circumstance. For example, you can’t add a Group section to a Contact section, but you can add a Group subsection.

5. If you chose Summary Sorted by, the list of field names on the right of the dialog box becomes available. Select the field you want to sort by, and choose Ascending or Descending from the Sort Order dropdown (see Figure 5).

6. Click OK and the section will be added to your report. If you chose either type of Summary section, you’ll be asked if you wish to add the section above or below the current section (see Figure 6).

Figure 3. The Define Sections dialog box.

Figure 4. The Add Section dialog box.

Figure 5. Specifying a field and sort order for Summary sorted by.

Figure 6. Determine the placement of a Summary section.

To remove a section, follow these steps:

1. Display your report in the report designer if necessary.

2. Choose Edit | Define Sections from the report designer menu (you can also right-click anywhere on the report itself and choose Define Sections).

3. Select the section you wish to remove, and click Delete. If the section contains any fields, you’ll be asked to confirm the deletion. If the field is empty, it will simply disappear in a puff of smoke (poof!).

Figure 7. A stack summary.

Summary Fields

Now that you know how to add Summary and Summary sorted by sections to your reports, let’s take a look at Summary fields. Summary fields perform summary operations on fields in your data sections. There are five summary functions available to you: Count, Total, Average, Minimum, and Maximum. Which summary functions are available to you depends on what type of field you choose to summarize. For example, you can’t Total a Character field.

To add a summary field to your report, do the following:

1. Create your Summary section. This can be a Summary or Summary sorted by, and can be above or below the data section it summarizes.

2. Place a new field in the Summary section (you learned how to place fields on your template in Part 1 of this series).

3. In the Field List dialog box, change the Field type to Summary. This activates the Summary type list (see Figure 8).

4. Select the summary function you wish to perform. When you do this, all available fields for that function will be displayed. Non-numeric fields aren’t available for any function other than Count, so you may find the field list pretty short when you choose Average.

5. Type a field label (if appropriate) for your Summary field (you can always add a label later if you forget) and click OK.

Figure 8. Inserting a Summary field.

Before you get all excited about calculations in reports, these summary fields do have some shortcomings:

• Even if a Character field contains only numeric data, you cannot create a Sum, Average, Minimum, or Maximum field without changing the field type. This is a good argument for planning your database structure carefully before you start dumping data into it.

• You can only place Summary fields in Summary sections. Oh, you can put them in any section, but they’ll only work in Summary sections.

• You can’t perform calculations of any kind on individual rows of the data sections. For example, if you want to multiply one Contact section field by another and have the result appear in a third field in the same row, well, that just isn’t going to happen... Oh, come on, it’s not the end of the world!

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