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When you choose to create a new report, Premvet 5 will walk you through the following stages:
At any point during the creation of a new report, you can press the ESCAPE KEY to terminate what you are doing and return to the menu.
PRINTOUT selection (What is to be printed?)
The first screen you will see when you select Create a new report is
is shown below:
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------| | Dummy Practice New report - PRINTOUT selection | |-----------------------------------------------------------------------| |---------Selection box----------| |-------Selected options-------| | Description | | | | Prac ref. | | | | Supp ref. * | | | Product code | | | | Supplier code | | | | Manuf. code | | | | Cost (Pack) | | | | Cost (Actual) | | | | Pack contents | | | | Quantity | | | | Dose | | | | Seasonal (Start) | | | | Seasonal (Finish) | | | | Flag | | | | Data | | | | Vat Rate | |------------------------------| | Special | |--------------------------------|
As you can see, there are 2 boxes on the screen. The left hand box contains all the possible fields that can be printed out and the right hand box contains the options selected so far. Obviously, when you first encounter this screen the right hand box will be empty.
Note: The RETURN key is used to indicate that selection is complete, so don't use it unless you have finished with this screen.
Selecting fields
Items are transferred from one box to another by selecting the
required option from the box on the left and pressing the SPACE
BAR. If the item does not exist on the right then it will appear
in the right hand box, if it has already been selected then it
will be removed from the right hand side.
So to select an item you press the space bar and to de-select an item you press the space bar again. By this means you build up a list of items to print out. The order in which they are selected is also the order in which they will be displayed/printed.
To move the highlight bar you can use the following :
Once you have finished with your selection press the RETURN key, and you will be asked if you want to 'C'ontinue 'E'dit or 'Q'uit. If you are happy with the selection press RETURN and the next screen will appear. Edit will re-display the printout selection screen with the currently selected option allowing you to make the appropriate corrections. Quit will return you to the menu enabling you to select a new option as appropriate.
Note:You must select at least one item to printout. The fields labelled 'SPECIAL 1 .. 3' have a special use. See the advanced section for an explanation of there use.
PRINTOUT Format (What will the column titles be?)
The report generator now knows what you want to print out. The
next step is to tidy up the width of the columns and the titles.
The screen will show the selected options e.g.
Field name Len Width Col. Heading
Description 25 25 Description
Prac ref. 10 10 Prac ref.
Supp ref. 15 15 Supp ref.
Cost (Pack) 9 9 Cost (Pac
Quantity 9 9 Quantity
Supplier Code 2 2 Su
Report width 76 characters (Normal)
Each item (or field) has a description and a maximum width; in
the above example the 'Prac ref.' (the practice reference field
on a stock record card) has a maximum size of 10 characters (because
when you're entering the practice reference onto a record card you
only have 10 characters available).
The above screen shows the full item name (Field name) and size (Len) of each item selected and these cannot be changed. However you can change the corresponding columns Width and Column heading.
The Col. heading is the title that will appear at the top of the printout indicating the appropriate item. The Width is how may characters of the item will be printed.
Why would I want to change these?
Col. Heading - You can alter the name to suit the space
available.
If you look at the report name for 'Supplier code' in the above example you will see that it is set at 'Su' instead of 'Supplier code'. This is because the width for this column is 2 characters and 'supplier code' is 13 characters, if the full name was displayed then the amount of information printed/displayed would be reduced drastically. So to make the name more meaningful you can change it as required to 'SC' for example. In other possible cases you might have selected options that all begin with the same text e.g. Selling 1, Selling 2, Selling 3 and you would want to change this so that you can tell these values apart when the report is output (S1, S2, S3, for example).
Width - You can alter the layout of what is printed to utilise the available space better.
Note: To avoid confusion, all dates automatically output in the format dd.mm.yyyy - If you want to revert to dd.mm.yy, set the character width of each date column to 8.
The report generator adds together the widths of all the options selected and determines if they will fit on the screen/printer and in the case of the printer whether it will have to switch to a condensed type style or not.
You may find that after selecting the required options there is not enough space for them all to be printed. You then have 2 choices: either reduce the number of options printed or reduce the amount of information printed about any one item. For example, practice reference - the default width for this item is 10 characters, however, if you know that you only use 5 characters, you can alter the width of this item to 5 characters thus giving you extra characters for another item.
Alternatively, you may only be printing 2 or 3 items, and normally each item will be separated from the next by a single space. This would have the appearance of everything being squeezed on the left hand side of the paper. You can increase the width to make better use of the available paper.
You may be designing a report to be printed but want to test it on the screen without wasting paper. Reducing the width of long fields e.g. Description, Address lines, client name etc., will enable to run the report on the screen to check the required information is present.
Remember: Altering the width of a field also alters the number of characters available to the column name/heading by the corresponding number.
Note: If the report width is greater than the number of characters your printer will print then you cannot leave this screen until the width has been reduced. In addition, if the width is greater than 80 characters then the report cannot be displayed.
So to summarise - we have told the report generator what to print and how to print it.
SORT selection (Do you want to sort into any order?)
The next step is to work out if the information being printed
should be sorted into any particular order. You will be asked the
question :
Do you wish to allocate sort fields? No YesIf you answer No then the items will be printed in NUMERIC order, i.e. the order they appeared in the records is the order they appear on the printout.
If you answer Yes, then the screen display changes e.g.
|--------------------------------------------------------------------| | Dummy Practice New report - SORT selection | |--------------------------------------------------------------------|Two boxes will be displayed in a similar manner to that explained in the printout selection section earlier. The left hand box contains all the options that are to be printed out. It is from these options you select how the report is to be sorted.|---------Sort selection---------| |-------Selected options-------| | Description | | | | Prac ref. | | | | Supplier code * | | | Cost (Pack) | | | | Quantity | |------------------------------| |--------------------------------|
Options are selected in an identical manner to the printout selection screen and the order they are selected in is the order by which they will be sorted.
You can sort on as many as 4 items. In the above example you may want to sort initially by the supplier code and then within each supplier code you may want the items in alphabetical order. You would first of all select 'Supplier code' then 'Description'. In most cases you would only need one sort field.
Once you are happy with the selection press RETURN and another screen will appear e.g.
Field name Max Length
Supplier Code 5 *****
Description 25 25
Field length : 30
Max number of records : 1770
The amount of space that is allocated to sort records is NOT
unlimited. Therefore if sort fields are used there is a limit to
the number of items that can be sorted. The more sort fields used
the fewer items sorted. You can use this screen to increase the
number of records that can be sorted.
The screen shows under 'Max number of records' the maximum number of records available with the present settings.
If one of the fields you are sorting on is numeric you CANNOT alter its length and this is indicated by asterisks '*' in the length column. The length will default to the maximum length of the field. You can reduce this figure but cannot increase it. In the above example we are using a sort length of 25 characters on the stock description, consequently only 1770 records can be handled.
If you have 2500 records you want printed the only way to accomplish this is to reduce the number of characters by which the description is sorted. You should also bear in mind that in the bulk of your records not all 25 characters will have been used, so you can probably get away with reducing the number down to 10. (The vet system usually only uses 4 characters for its sorts).
If the number is reduced too far then problems can occur. For example, using an exaggerated case of 1 character, you will get a list where all the A's are grouped together, and all the B's are grouped together etc., but within the groups the records are completely jumbled.
Once you have made your selection press RETURN, and continue, edit or abort as appropriate.
So to summarise - we have told the report generator what to print, how to print it and whether it is to be sorted or not.
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