Service Suite - Products
           - How can I create my own reports?

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

In order to create a new report based on your products, you must be in the products module:

In the icon bar you click the link: "Print", which launches following dialog:

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

The Report Designer will now be launched with the dialog: "Add new report" active. As it is very easy to create new reports, in this example we will describe how to make a label report for an ordinary printer, in this case a "HP DeskJet 1120C", as this kind of report illustrates the more advanced features of the Report Designer.

On the first tab: "Report" information's such as "Name", "Description" and "Author" must be supplied. Besides these information's you must select which printer the report should be designed for. 

The report type allows you to select which type of report to create. In this case we wish to create a labeling report for our products, which is why we select the type "Inventory"

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

Your default printer will usually be configured to print on your default paper size, but should this not be the case, you can here select which paper size the report should be defined for. In this case we choose A4.

As we wish to print on a label sheet, it is important to define our margins correctly. This is done by selecting the tab: "Margins"

Because we in this example are creating a label report for printing on label sheets, we have to enter a number of settings that defines our label sheet. This is done by selecting the tab: "Labels".

On this tab we first select that this report is a label report, by clicking in the field: "This is a label report". When this is done, it will be possible to enter the values that define our label sheet.

When these settings have been entered, we press the button: "OK" which will close the dialog and display the screen in which the actual creation of the report takes place:

As we in the process of creating a label report for a label sheet, the detail section will have the same dimensions as one label. In this example we assume that you are familiar with how to insert data fields on a report. How to insert data fields on a report is described in the article: "How do I create a report for my customers".

As we wish to label all our products with a bar code we have chosen to add 3 fields to this report. The fields are the description, the item number to be printed as a bar code, as well as the item number in clear text.

Now that we have defined our fields, we select the menu: "Save and close". The Report Designer will now be closed and we can select our new report from the list of available reports:

When the button: "Print preview" is clicked Service Suite will display the report as shown below:

Here you can click on the printer from the toolbar in order to print the label report.

When label reports are printed there is a special feature worth noticing, and that is the small icon called: "Label properties". When this icon is clicked following dialog will appear:

In this dialog you can specify which label that should be the first label to print on, as well as how many copies of each label is to be printed. This allows you to print on a "used" label sheet where e.g. the first 4 labels have been removed. If we as shown above select that the fifth label should be the first to print on, and that we would like to have each label printed twice, the report will be readjusted to look like this: 

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 wish to create other kinds of reports you can find more examples about how to do this in the tips & tricks section of this site.

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