Make a Report

Note: you can edit as desired the 3 built-in reports: sign-in sheets, address labels, and name-badge labels.

Overview

You can select an existing report from the page's dynamic menu, or you can create a new report. Once the page's current report is the one you want to work on, there are 3 aspects to building a report definition.

You need to set the report's core properties.

• They are initially set when you use Do Setup Action->CREATE REPORT.
• They are edited via Do Setup Action->Update its Props.

You need to create and position the pieces of info that you want in the report, as described in the next section.

• You create the desired columns and sub-report title terms (and set their initial properties) using Add Column and Add Term, including any special formatting you want.

You need to set the report's normal output rules. A report has two kinds of output rules. Layout rules specify how the report is formatted. Is-about rules specify which signups/people to include in the report (e.g. the signups of the current year versus the ones of the previous year).

• These are also initially set when you create a report.
• They are updated via the Tweak Layout button and the various Report-is-about commands; and they are saved by clicking on the save them link and then on Save Tweaks' Update radio button and Save button.

Organizing the Pieces of Info in a Report

Suppose you want to do a Seminar Attendance report. You might want to output all columns in one overall report, or you might want to define title terms so as to chunk the report into sub-reports. Your chunking choices in this example are: the the people per seminar or the seminars per person. The examples in this section show how PRESTO makes these choices available to you.

The examples assume you have the following signups:

• Ann signed up for Seminar 1 and Seminar 2.
• Bob signed up for Seminar 1.
• Dan signed up for Seminar 1 and Seminar 2.
• Eve signed up for Seminar 2.

One Overall Report

Do two Add Column's, setting one's Value to Person's->First Name and the other's to Schedule Item's->Activity.

Sub-report per Seminar

Do an Add Term for Schedule Item's->Activity. Do an Add Column for Person's->First Name. This leads to a report with two chunks:

Sub-report per Person

Do an Add Term for Person's->First Name. Do an Add Column for Schedule Item's->Activity. This leads to a report with four chunks:

Creating Multiple Versions of the Same Report

The above examples assume you only need one version of the Seminar Attendance report. What happens if you sometimes want an unchunked report and sometimes one by seminar?

Presumably you do not want to create the second report from scratch. Also even though you now have two report names, you probably still want the chunk titles to be as shown above. To achieve this:

1. Copy the 1st report (Do Setup Action->Copy this Report) and name the copied report Seminar Attendance, by seminar. (This has the desired effect because the report generator drops , by ... phrases when it outputs a chunk title).
2. Double-click on the Activity column's value (i.e. on the !i.activity!).
3. Click on the that is after the report's title, thereby changing Activity from a column to a title term.

Output a Report

Overview

Once you are satisfied with a report's definition, you can output the report whenever you like:

1. Choose the desired report from the page's dynamic menu.
2. If the report's normal output rules are not what you need right now, temporarily establish the desired rules using Tweak Layout and/or the Report Is About commands.
3. Click on Display Report to output the report to your screen, or click on Put Report in File to output an HTML file containing the report.

Tweaking Output Rules

Temporary output rules give you a way of outputting the same basic report, but with different formatting or different signups/people (e.g. the signups of the current year versus the ones of the previous year). When you are done with them, just click on clear them (or select a new report or PRESTO page).

If you are on the Admin Report page, you also have the option of saving these rules for future use. To do this, click on save them. This displays the Save box, which gives you the choice of updating the current report's output rules or creating a new report containing the tweaked rules.

Printing A Displayed Report

You print a report by clicking on the Print Report button below the displayed report. However you may want to do some setup first. In particular:

• If you are printing a Calendar report and a month has data on most days of the week, you may need to squeeze things to get all 7 columns to fit in the available space. You have 3 things you can do: use Landscape orientation, minimize the left and right margins, and set the page scale factor to Fit-to-Page or to less than 100%.
• If you are printing a Label report onto paper stock containing pre-cut adhesive labels, you need to align your report precisely. That is, you should tweak your page margins as needed before you print the report.

Special Report Formatting

The main way is to insert HTML directly into the value of columns and terms as you create them. Localized tweaks are straightforward (assuming you know HTML of course). For example, to change the color of something, precede it with <span style=color:a color> and follow it with </span>.

However the results of incorrect HTML are unpredictable, and you are on your own in diagnosing them. Here are some common mistakes:

• You did not terminate a tag's scope: by omitting the closing tag, omitting its slash, or misspelling it.
• You used paragraph-level tags (e.g. p, div, li) in title terms. This cannot be done since each term is only part of the overall title paragraph.
• You used such a tag in a column without taking account of its side-effects. For example, starting a column's value with <p> will cause a paragraph top margin to precede each cell's value.

It is also possible to tweak the actual styles PRESTO uses. However this is not for the faint of heart. To do this, do a Put Report in File, examine the styles PRESTO uses, and then redefine them with a stylesheet of your own.