A Sharp Report, Part 2:  Sections

November 2003

Scott Holmes
ACT! Certified Consultant
Cornerstone Solutions, Inc.

Continued...

Filter Options

When you run any report, a dialog box displays, in which (among other things) you can choose how to filter the report. I meet a lot of users who complain about having to change these options every single time they run their reports. Well, help is at hand. You can, as part of your report definition, change the default filter options. I usually change the Send output to: options to Preview so that I don’t accidentally waste a bunch of paper.

To change filter options for a Report Template, follow these steps:

1. Edit the template.

2. Choose Edit | Define Filters from the report editor menu (see Figure 14).

3. Change the desired options.

4. Save the report. From now on, when you run this report, the filtering options will be as you set them.

Figure 14. The Define Filters dialog box.

Modifying an Existing Report

Until now, I’ve been discussing the creation of “from scratch” reports. In real life, it’s often easier to modify an existing report than to create a new one — for example, if you added several new fields to your database structure and wanted to include them on the standard Contact report. There are a ton of fields on the standard Contact report, and believe me, you don’t want to have to add all of those basic fields again just so you can say you did it yourself. Instead, edit the Contact report and add the new fields (I’d also suggest deleting some of the fields you don’t use or don’t want to see).

To modify an existing report, do the following:

1. Choose Report | Edit Report Template.

2. Choose the template file you wish to edit, and click Open. The report will be displayed in the report editor.

3. Make the desired changes to the report and save. If you wish to keep the original report as is, choose File | Save As and give your modified report a new name.

Mystic Report Names

Some report names are magic. Their filenames alone determine how ACT! reacts to them. There are two things you need to know about report names:

• There’s a connection between report filenames and the Report menu. When, for example, you choose Report | Contact Report, how does ACT! know which report to run? ACT! knows which report to run because a programmer told it. The Contact report itself is named Contact6.rep, unless you’re using ACT! 5, in which case it’s Contact5.rep, unless you’re using ACT! 4... Well, you get the picture. If you’ve been using ACT! for a long time, you may find that you have several Contact Report Templates in your Report folder, all of which do basically the same thing. This only becomes an issue if you wish to edit the templates that run directly from the menu. Once you figure out the code, you’ll find it pretty easy to find the appropriate reports for your version of ACT!.

• There is a class of ACT! reports that are not only linked to specific Report menu commands but also can’t be renamed when you modify them. These reports perform filtering that the report generator is not, by itself, able to perform. At some point in ACT!’s evolution, it was decided to add this filtering to the ACT! program itself instead of the report generator. No, I don’t know why.

This second issue leaves us with a problem. What do we do if we want to base a new report on one of these magic reports, and don’t want to replace the original? If the name of the file weren’t important, we’d just save a copy of the report with a different name and that would be that. But if we do that with one of these reports, the copy will no longer work properly. So what do we do? Instead of saving the file with a new name, save it into a different folder than the original and keep the filename the same. Then you can make your changes to the copy and use either as the occasion dictates.

You thought I was going to leave you hanging, didn’t you? Here’s a list of the reports whose names you dare not change:

• notehis6.rep (the Notes/History report)

• activit6.rep (the Activities/Time Spent report)

• history6.rep (the History Summary report)

• slscntc6.rep (the Sales by Contact report)

• tasklis6.rep (the Task List report)

If you’re an ACT! 5 user, change the 6 to a 5 in each filename, and if you’re an ACT! 4 user, remove the trailing number altogether (and there’s no Sales by Contact report).

Conclusion

I hope this article has provided you with the tools you need in order to create and modify your reports to suit you. The report design screen has its quirks, and getting a report to look just right can be frustrating, but if you keep trying you’ll find yourself the master of your own reports, and those reports will look sharp!

Scott Holmes is a consultant with Cornerstone Solutions, Inc., in Houston, TX. He’s been a software consultant for 16 years and an ACT! consultant for five years. Scott has developed numerous ACT! add-on products, which can be found at http://www.cornerstonesolutions.com/.

<<< Previous Page |

© Copyright 2003 Buzz Publishing. All rights reserved. Contact web person