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Crystal Reports Tools: Improve Performance While Saving Time and Money |
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Crystal Reports: Change Column Order |
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| The columns in your report
may be more useful in a different sequence. The more information we include in our reports, the more useful they are for decision making. Near the end of a calendar year, a monthly or quarterly summary of some key measures will be very useful. But that January to December report with all those monthly columns loses a lot of columns when you run it next year in January or February. It is more useful to have a report with a rolling 12 months, so it’s always got a full set of data. Here is a quarterly report example. But even then, we can improve the report with a couple of minor changes.
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| The first thing to note is that there are 5
Quarterly columns and a total column. Users are more comfortable if the
columns proceed in chronological order. While it might be easy to have the most recent column on the left, many interpret the information more easily if the columns are in successive periods. |
 Click to enlarge |
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| Another decision is what to do
with the current period. This period is not yet completed, so it could be
argued that it is less confusing to not have that column. That would work
fine for end of the period reports. But you could also create a daily
reporting regime with a “this period to date” column. It could highlight if
the period is proceeding well or is behind target. The total column in the report above is the total of the rolling 4 intact columns. So it should really be beside the Qtr 1 or Qtr 4 column rather than being adjacent to a column that is not included in the calculation. It is more difficult to compare non adjacent columns, so if we want the incomplete period to compare with the other quarters, it makes the most sense to actually have the total column first, then the rolling quarters, and finally how this period is doing so far this month.
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| Our recommended column layout is to the right. |
Click to enlarge |
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| This article is copyrighted by Crystalkeen, Mindconnection, and Chelsea Technologies Ltd. It may be freely copied and distributed as long as the original copyright is displayed and no modifications are made to this material. Extracts are permitted. The names Crystal Reports and Seagate Info are trademarks owned by Business Objects. | |||||||||||
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