The way the report groupings in RMS' "Active Reports" reporting tool are displayed can be very cumbersome. It shows all of the higher-level groupings, when all I want to see is the lowest level of grouping.
Example: I want to look at an inventory report, grouped by department, category, and a third criteria called season (using one of the item subdescriptions). I setup my colums in the correct order, then specify I want to group by the first three columns.
Now I have a hierarchical report, with a summary line for each level of grouping. When I collapse the group rows, my report looks like this: summary line for department XYZ a summary line for department XYZ, category ABC a summary line for department XYZ, category ABC, season 1 a summary line for department XYZ, category ABC, season 2 a summary line for department XYZ, category PDQ a summary line for department XYZ, category PDQ, season 1 a summary line for department XYZ, category PDQ, season 2 a summary line for department XYZ, category PDQ, season 3 a summary line for department FOO a summary line for department FOO, category DEF a summary line for department FOO, category DEF, season 1 a summary line for department FOO, category KLM a summary line for department FOO, category KLM, season 1 a summary line for department FOO, category KLM, season 2 a summary line for department FOO, category KLM, season 3
All I really want to see is the information at the department, category, and season level. I don't care about the summary lines by department only or by department and category only.
What should only be 9 lines is coming out in 15 lines, a waste of nearly half of my report. This is only three levels of grouping, for a very small amount of data. Typically, I have 4 or more levels of grouping , and I have 5 or 6 departments, each one containing a dozen or more categories. I wind up with a huge report with excess of 100 pages, but the lowest grouping levels could be contained on about half that.
The same sort of functionality deficiency affects my sales reports (usually grouped by store, department, category, season, and may also be grouped by date, by customer state, and/or a handful of others) and other inventory reports which group information by color, size, and other criteria which I may or may not know about at this time.
To complicate matters, our accounting department wants all of their reports sent to them in Excel format. I can export my report to a CSV file, but then I have to spend literally hours going through and deleting the rows which contain the unwanted summary lines.
I'd like to suggest, here and now, that Microsoft consider changing their report tool, so that in addtion to "Collapse All Groups" and "Collapse Group Rows", there is an option "Collapse to Lowest Group."
In the meantime, is there any way that someone has come up with to eliminate the higher level groupings from their report, and only show the lowest level? I don't mind having to hack and hardcode my .QRP report files for the most part, since 90% of my report users will not change the groupings.
Bill Yater The Worth Collection snipped-for-privacy@worthltd.com
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