Top Tip - Report Options: Show Details & Edit Subtotals

The Report Options section, available for both Standard & Advanced Reports, provides two ways to tailor the information displayed on a report:

1. Show Details

This is a check box setting that, when ticked, will provide more detailed information about the records included in a report. When unticked, the report will display the information in summarised form.

As an example, here is a Folder Activity Report with the Show Details checkbox unticked:

This layout is quite useful to provide high-level information on the total commission amount or total number of folders to someone who is not interested in the details.

This is the same report with the Show Details checkbox ticked:

This layout is more useful to someone who needs to take a closer look to each folder.

2. Edit Subtotals

This button provides access to a grid where it is possible to group items in a report using specific criteria. Using the same Folder Activity Report as an example, let's look at grouping by staff code and destination. By clicking Edit Subtotals, in the grid we can choose Folder Owned By Staff Code and Folder Destination Name as subtotal fields:

NOTE: It is worth pointing out the difference between the subtotal field (which is the data the report is grouped by) and the subtotal label field (which is the data used to label each section in the report). It is more user friendly to display the staff name or the country name rather than the staff 3-letter code or the country 2-letter code (which not everyone may know).

Adding the fields in the order above means that the report records will be grouped by consultant first, and then by destination:

Each subtotal displays a header and a footer and if multiple subtotals are used, the report might look busy with data and not to easy to read. In this case, it might be useful to suppress the header and/or the footer.

For example, if I suppress the header for the destination:

This is how the report looks:

If I suppress both the header and the footer for the destination:

This is how the report looks:

In this last example, although I don't see the report sections by destination, the folders are still grouped by destination.

Subtotals allow you to navigate through the report more easily as well. This is particularly handy when you are looking for specific data in a large report.

By expanding the details of each subtotal in the Subtotals menu on the left hand side and selecting a particular subtotal, the report will highlight the matching section and it will display it to you. For example, from looking at page 2 of a 25 pages long report, you might jump to page 20 of the report by selecting a subtotal in the left panel.

In the below example, by expanding the details for staff code SYS and selecting Barcelona as the destination, the report highlighted the matching section and jumped to page 2: