Opening the Quick Report Editor
Adding columns to the report
A note about related data
Creating the report
More info
Opening the Quick Report Editor
The first thing you need to do is find the records that you want to include in your report:
- Click on the Find Data button on the main CatBase window
- Choose the table you want to build the report on
- Click on View All Records to include the whole table in the report, or search for the records you want to include
NOTE: If you have related data in your database, please read the section "A note about related data", below.
With your list of records displayed, click on the Report button:
The Quick Report Editor opens up:
The top area of the editor shows the columns that will be included in your report (none at the moment!)
Adding columns to the report
There are two ways to add columns:
- Drag a field name into the Sort order area: do this for the field or fields that you want to sort your report on (note: you cannot add a Text type field to the Sort order - they are shown with a little text icon, like the Description field shown here.)
- Double-click on a field name
As an example, let's suppose we want to create a report listing all Product Names and their main picture names, and we want it sorted by Product Name.
- Scroll down to Product Name
- Drag and drop Product Name into the Sort order area
- Find the field Main Picture and double-click on it
- We will now see the Product Name shown in the Sort order area, and the column area will look like this:
You can make various adjustments to the columns:
- By default, the columns will be automatically sized. This can be a problem if the report is going to be printed, as if they are too wide to fit on the paper they will simply disappear. To manually size each column, click in its header row, then choose Automatic Width from the Columns menu to un-select it. You will then be able to modify the widths of the columns.
- Choose the font and style for an entire column or for rows by using the formatting controls in the area above the columns
- Add totals and other summary calculations by clicking in a Total row cell and choosing a function from the Cells menu
A note about related data
You can include data from a related table in your report, but if you have a "many-to-many" data relationship, this will not work reliably. A many-to-many relationship exists when you have multiple "child" records related to multiple "parent" records - for example, Products and Parts: each Product can have any number of Parts related to it, and each Part can be related to any number of Products. (Please see our Database 101 tutorial for more info about database relations.) In this case, it would be better to create a Publishing Style Sheet and choose the Plain Text option for your Publishing Destination.
To include data from a related table:
- You must start out with a list of records from the "many" table. For example, if you have Products and Parts, Parts is the many table. If you have Companies and Employees, Employees is the many table. It's the "child" table in the relationship.
- The list of fields that initially appears in the Quick Report field list is form the many table. To include fields from the "one", or "parent" table, choose Related Tables from the popup menu above the field list:
- The list of fields will then change a little. Scroll down until you see the relation indicator:
- Click on the table that you want to get related data from - eg Products in this example. The field list changes again, to show the fields from the Products table:
- Now you can add fields from that table to your report
Creating the report
By default, the report will be printed when you run it. You can change this if you want to send the report to a text file, graph, or HTML file:
- Click on the File menu and move your mouse down to Destination
- Choose your desired output destination from the flyout menu
To produce the report, choose Generate ... from the File menu.