Report generator: Utilities

Report generator: Utilities

Utilities

The option 'Misc' when editing a report (or the last screen when creating a new report) has some defaults.

These default can be changed on a per report basis, if you are always changing one of the options you can alter the default. This is done using the 'Defaults' option on the Utilities menu.

Defaults

Various options to control the size of the printer or paper being used and how financial figures are printed. When selected the following will be displayed:

    Maximum paper width           132
    Shift to condensed mode       80 
    Paper length                  66
    Default currency format       9 
    Use label format              No 
    New line on sort              No 
    Client or Animal based        Animal

You will not normally have to change any of these settings and can either press the <RETURN> key through all the questions or press the <ESC> key.

Maximum Paper Width - What is the maximum number of characters you can print on your printer. Normally this will be 132 for 80 column printers. If you are using 'wide carrige' printer you can change this to take advantage of the printer.
Shift to Condensed - At what point across the paper should the print switch into condensed text.
Paper Length - The length of stationary being used.
Default currency format - When printing out financial fields all the amounts are formatted so they 'look' nice on the screen/printer. The number contained here is the width of these numbers if not specified anywhere else. All financial fields will include 2 decimal places, so if set to 9 as in the example above the range of numbers that will be printed is -99999.99 to 999999.99. If the number being printed exceeds this range then asterisks will be printed instead.
Use label format - There is a special format that should be used to print on labels. The report generator will find the label size to use from the 'Label maker' within the Premvet 5 system.
New line on sort - If you are sorting any of the fields you can get the system to 'take a new line' after each sub-division. This splits up the printout making it easier to see where each section ends. If this option is set to 'Yes' then a count of the numbers in each sub-division will be given on the summary page.
Client or Animal Based - Do you want the system to scan and output every 'Animal' it finds or just output if it matches the 'client'.
These options will be saved and recalled each time the report generator is used.
In addition, they will also be stored with any reports created. If they are changed any existing reports will use the old values and you should use the 'Edit a report' option if the change will affect an existing report. This is to allow reports to be created that will run on different sizes of paper without any changes needing to be made when being run.

List abbreviation
Explained in the advanced section of this chapter. You can printout and search extrapolated fields. These fields are given abbreviations so they can be accessed. This option will list the available abbreviations on the printer. It is a good idea to print them out and keep them with the manual for easy reference. There is a set of abbreviations for Stock, Client records, Automatic pricing, Purchase ledger and herd fertility. The appropriate list will be produced depending on where the report generator was started from.

Available reports
This will print the reports that are available and any associated data files. Like the abbreviations above the information listed will be unique to the selected option e.g. Stock, Purchase ledger etc. See the next section for a fuller explanation of the files details. To summarise the report content, the report will be broken down as follows:
1. GENERATOR FILES - these a the stored reports which can be run or edited.
2. RECORD FORMAT - these files contain a sub-set of existing records that in turn can be searched.
3. SPOOLED/ASCII - files containing data for printing later or for importing into other packages.
4. MAILMERGE - Data files compatible with the Premvet 5 merge printing option.
The list will also contain the size/number of records and the date and time they were created.

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