Using the Report Designer

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The Report Designer of the estimating system which allows you to tailor existing estimating Reports to your specific needs.

In the Report Designer window, you can change:

* Headings and footings (including adding your company logo or adapting Reports to print on your letterhead)

* The title of the Report

* Fonts and colors for all information in the Report and in the headings/footings

* The order which fields appear

* The width of the fields

* Which fields are shown

* The formatting of fields, such as the number of digits to the right of the decimal, whether a dollar sign appears before costs, whether commas are used as a thousands separator, whether to blank-out zeros, left/right/center justification, etc.

To get into the Report Designer, you may either press the Customize Report... button on one of the three Report dialogs (Bid Reports, Price Book Reports, or Quick Print), or press the Design button from the Report Form.

To change the normal title of the Report, double click on the field (box) that contains something like IIF(EMPTY(m.repTitle), followed by the Report title, etc. In the Report Expression dialog box which appears, click on the Expression... button. Next, in the Expression Builder dialog box, locate the existing Report title in quotes, and replace it with your new Report title, making sure not to delete the quotes or change anything outside the quotes. Do not change the spelling or punctuation or anything outside the quotes or your Report may no longer work!! (If you make a mistake, press Cancel and then the Expression... button again.) Press OK in the Expression Builder and then in the Report Expression dialog box to return to the Report Designer. To test your new title, select Page Preview... from the Report menu.

To change a field in the Report, just click on the field. Eight small squares called handles will appear on the corners and on the edges of the field to indicate the field is selected. Text (such as a heading) or lines in the Report can also be selected this way. Once the field is selected, you may change a variety of attributes of the field:

To change the font of the field, click on an object to select it, and then choose Font... from the Object menu. Select the desired font from the Font dialog box. This can also be used to bold, italicize, or underline the text in a field.

The Color of the field or even the background can be changed by choosing Pen Color (for foreground) or Fill Color (for background) from the Object menu. You will need to have a color printer in order to see color in your Reports. Note that previews are always displayed in black and white.

The characters in the field can be left-, right- or center-justified using the Text Alignment menu option, again off the Object menu.

To move a field, make sure it is selected, then press the mouse down somewhere in the middle of the field (not the edges or corners) and drag the field to where you want it. You may also use the cursor arrows on the keyboard to move the field. Hint: You may want to turn on position and size indicators in the footer. If you don’t see anything in the footer when something is selected in the Report, select Show Position from the Report menu.

To change the size of a field, use the "handles" located around the selected object. Choose the handle on the edge which you want to shrink or expand. For instance, to make a field wider, drag the handle on the right edge further to the right. Warning: If you shrink a number or cost field too small to show all the digits in the formatting, it will display as "*****". Sometimes you will need to make the fields wider than you might think to ensure they will not display asterisks (*****). You may need to overlap fields in some Reports. See below for instructions for changing the formatting. The field size can also be changed using the keyboard by pressing down the Shift key and using the cursor arrows. The Shift+Right Arrow key makes the field wider, and the Shift+Left Arrow key makes it narrower. The Shift+Up or Shift+Down Arrow keys make the field taller or shorter.

A field’s formatting can be changed by double-clicking the field after it is selected, and pressing the "Format..." button on the dialog box. Formatting includes:

* specifying how many decimals places to print

* whether zeros are blanked out

* whether a currency symbol ($, etc.) is printing

* how negative numbers are indicated (e.g., -33, or (33)).

Some of these options appear as check boxes on the formatting dialog box. Others are based on the "picture" of how the field is to be printed. For instance, a picture of "##,###.##" indicates a number with 5 digits to the left of the decimal, using a comma as a thousand’s separator, if necessary, and 2 digits to the right of the decimal.

To change the words in the headings (not boxed fields), choose the Text Tool from the Report Toolbar on the left of the Report Design window. It is shown as the letter "A", and is second from the top. Once it is selected, it will appear depressed. Then click in the heading you wish to change between the characters where you want your text-edit cursor to appear. (If you click outside of it, you will be adding a new heading.) Now you may edit the heading by typing and using the arrow, Insert and Delete keys, as you would normally.

If the heading has a box around it (instead of being just words), it is really a computed field. For instance, most Bid Reports have a heading of

"Bid "+m.UsrCurBid+": "+m.UsrBidDescr

This heading displays the word "Bid" followed by a space (which is also in the quotes), followed by the variable m.UsrCurBid, which holds the current Bid Code, followed by a colon and space in quotes, and ending with another variable, m.UsrBidDescr, which holds the current Bid’s Description. If you wanted to display just the Bid’s Description, you could double-click on the field to get to the field information dialog, and the press the Expression... button to see the Expression Builder, and then remove all but the m.UsrBidDescr from the expression.

To save your work, select Save Report from the File menu, or press the F12 key.

If you make a mistake, you can usually un-do it with the Undo option from the Edit menu, or by pressing Ctrl+Z. This will allow you to undo the most recent change you have made in most cases. If you need to undo less recent changes, you can revert back to your last-saved version of the customized Report by selecting Revert from the File menu. If you need to start over, exit the Report Design window and Delete the customized Report from the Report dialog box. Then go back to show Standard Reports and ask to Customize Report... again.

To see a preview of how your Report will look, select Page Preview... from the Report menu, or just press Ctrl+I. This is a good way to check your work before it is saved.

When you are finished, select Exit Report Design from the File menu. If you have made any changes since you last saved the Report you’re working on, you will be asked if you want to keep them. Your Custom Report will now appear on the Custom Reports List.

Advanced Tips, Tricks and Techniques

Once you are familiar with the basics of Report customization, you may want to try some more sophisticated techniques described below.

Many people have a few Reports they use all the time. You can create a Frequently-Used Reports List for your convenience by "customizing" all the Reports you use, even if you don’t have to change the originals. That way all of your most-used Reports will appear in one convenient list, and display exactly as you want them!

To select additional objects (fields, headings, lines, etc.) and be able to change them all at once, hold down the Shift key while clicking to select additional objects. All of the objects selected will appear with "handles." You can move them all at once, or change any of the attributes (font, color, etc.) which are selected from the Object menu. If you later change your mind about one of the objects selected, you can Shift and click it again to de-select that object but not all the others. Clicking outside of any objects (such as one the white space of the Report) will de-select all the objects.

To select a group of objects in a rectangular area all at once, you can drag a "lasso" around all of them. To do this, position the mouse over white space (Report area not used by any object) at one corner of the objects you wish to select. Then press the mouse button down and drag it over all the objects you wish to select. Then release the mouse button. All the objects in the area will be selected. If any unwanted objects are also selected, use Shift+Click (as described above) to un-select them while keeping the rest selected.

To delete an object from the Report, select it and press the Delete key.

To copy an object from another Report, go to the Report where the objects you want to copy is, and select the object(s). Choose Copy from the Edit menu, or press Ctrl+C. Now leave the Report Design window and go into the Report Design window for the Report you want to copy the object(s) into. Select Paste from the Edit menu, or press Ctrl+V. The object(s) will appear about where it was on the Report it/they came from, which is probably not where you want them on the new Report. Move them to where they belong.

Warning: If you copy or add new fields to your Reports, make sure that the new fields come from the same data table as the rest of the fields in that Report. To see what table the fields come from, double-click on the field and look in the area to the right of the "Expression:" push button. It will say something like "Takeoff.Qty". "Takeoff" is the table. ("Takeoff" is the internal name for the Bid Item table.) Do not mix Bid Item table fields with Cost Type table fields, or even (Price Book) Item table fields; you will not get the results you expect! In general, your Report will just show the current record in some other table, again and again. You cannot change what table the Report is being done on! In some cases, fields do not have a table name, just a field name, e.g., "Qty". These fields are assumed to belong to the current table being reported.

To shrink or expand a band of the Report (such as the Page Heading), find the gray divider beneath the band. Drag the square on the left edge of that divider down to expand or up to shrink. (The square will be on the ruler up the left-hand size of the Report page). If you are shrinking a band, be sure there is nothing in the area you are getting rid of.

To add your logo or a picture to the Report, you will need a picture in a .BMP (bitmap) format file. You can use a scanner or your favorite paint program to create the picture file. Click on the Picture Tool (located at bottom of the Report Toolbar). It will appear depressed. Now drag out the area where the picture will appear: this is done by moving to the upper-left corner of the picture’s area, press down the mouse button and holding it down will moving to the lower-right corner of the area where the picture will appear, and then releasing the mouse button. (Don’t worry if you don’t get the size exactly right; you can always move or re-size it.) A Report Picture dialog will appear. If you know the name and directory for the file, you can type it into the field to the right of the "File:" push-button. If not, you can press the "File:" button and use the handy picture selection dialog box. Once you have selected a picture, you may choose how to scale it (if necessary) to fit in the area provided. Click on the OK button when you are finished.

The Page Size can be changed to print on legal, ledger, or other sizes you want use. To change the page size for the Report, select "Page Layout..." from the Report menu. You may also associate the Report will any special printer you may wish to use from this dialog box.

To adapt a Report to print on your letterhead, first make sure the page size is correct (as described in the previous paragraph). Then try printing the Report on your letterhead. Check what will have to be moved or eliminated, and how much space is necessary. Make sure the Report Design rulers are shown in inches. (If not, correct it using the "Ruler/Grid..." option from the Report menu.) It may be necessary to expand the page header or footer band, as described above. Then you may wish to move the headings, or eliminate them so they don’t print on top of your letterhead text or logo. The footer can be changed similarly.

Pre-Printed Forms (such as those available from NEBS or other sources) can also be used, but setting up the Reports can take some intricate work. Eliminate the headings and footings (but leave space in the Report to the headings and footings on the forms!), and position the fields to where they appear on the forms. You will probably need to test printing to the forms several times to get the field positions just right.

If you have multiple copies of the estimating system, and wish to use your customized Reports on all your systems, you may copy all the customized Reports. They are located in the \ESTWIN\REPORTS\CUSTOM directory. (Substitute your estimating directory name for "ESTWIN" if it is different.) You may simply copy all the files to another system’s \ESTWIN\REPORTS\CUSTOM directory (etc.). (You may need to create the CUSTOM directory/folder.) Please note that each Report design requires two files, one with the extension ".FRX" and one ".FRT". These two files should always be copied together, or you may get the error "Memo file is missing, corrupt or invalid" when you try to run or edit the Report. It is a good idea to make one system your master copy of the Reports, making changes there and only there, and then copy to all the other systems. If you have included any pictures (logos, etc.) in your Reports, they will need to be available on all copies of the estimating system which use those Reports, and located in the same directory/folder. The \ESTWIN\REPORTS\CUSTOM directory may be a good spot to keep all your report-related .BMP.

Need to do more? Most of the frequently-requested changes are described here, but if you would like to do something more with your Reports, we offer technical assistance and custom Report writing on a fee basis. Please call 1-888-356-6418 for details.