Service Suite - Customers
           - How do I create my own reports?

If you wish to create your own reports, you must have a valid license to the Report Designer in Service Suite.

In order to create a new report based on your customers, you must be in the customer ledger:

From the icon bar you select the link: "Print", which will launch this dialog:

If you have a valid license for the Report Designer in Service Suite, the button: "New" will be enabled. Pressing: "New" will launch the built-in report designer:

The Report Designer will now be launched and you will see the dialog: "Add new report". As it is very easy to create new reports this example describes how to create a report for a label printer, in this case the "Dymo LabelWriter 320", as this shows most of the features of the Report Designer, opposed to the creation of an ordinary report.

On the first tab: "Report" information's such as "Name", "Description" and "Author" are entered. Besides this the printer that the report should be designed for is selected. Because we in this case wish to create a new report for a special "Label Printer" it is important to select this printer.

The report type allows you to select which type of report you wish to create. In this case we wish to create a report for printing address labels, which is why we select the type "Customer lists".

As the size of the labels is important we select the tab: "Paper settings"

A "Label Printer" as this DYMO, can print on numerous different labels of different sizes. In this example we select the label type currently in our printer and select that the orientation of the label should be portrait.

As our labels are relatively small (57mm*32mm) we need to adjust the reports margins as well. This is done by selecting the tab: "Margins".

As a label of this size is quite small we choose to set all the margins to 2mm. The tab: "Labels" are used if you wish to design a report for a label sheet. In this case where we use a label printer, the report should not be a label report, as the label printer treats each label as an ordinary sheet of paper. If you wish to design a label report you should follow the steps in the article: How to create a label report.

Now that we have entered the settings for this report we press the button: "OK", which will take us to the screen in which the design of the report itself is done.

Because we in this example have selected a small paper size, the design section is similarly small. If we had selected a larger paper size the design section would have been larger, as the representation of the section on the screen reflects the physical size of the paper.

The properties for the selected control, show the settings of the selected control, and provide a way for modifying those settings.

From the toolbar you can insert new fields and controls on the selected section, marked by the red border, of your report. The toolbar looks like this:

As the purpose of this report will be to print address labels, we insert 6 data fields, which should be bound to the customers address information's. We arrange these fields so that our details section now looks like this:

Now all we need to do is to select which data each field should be bound to. This is done by selecting a data field, and in the list of properties selecting which data the data field should be bound to:

When all the data fields has been specified our design section looks like this:

From the menu we now select: "Save and close". The Report Designer will now be closed and we can now select our new report from the list.

When we press the button: "Print Preview", Service Suite will launch the report as shown below:

In order to print the report, all you need to do is clicking on the printer icon in the toolbar.

It is possible to create numerous kinds of reports and on these pages we have tried to cover the most frequently used report types. If you e.g. wish to design a label report you can find step by step instructions on how to do this in the Tips & Tricks section of the products module.

If you have any questions about how to design your own reports in Service Suite, you are always welcome to contact us at: servicesuite@mamut.com