Well this seems like the week to complete the basic OpenOffice Base series with a post on how to create reports. Most people consider reports one of the things all databases should do. The problem with the reports are that they are generated on paper. If your office is going green, then yous should think of ways to reduce the use of paper. OpenOffice comes with a pdf printing module. Go ahead and burn a couple of electrons. How do make a report after the break
This is going to be another image intensive post so stand by. We start off with our database open in OpenOffice or NeoOffice. All the screen shots in this post were taken with NeoOffice. That should be no problem for anyone. We choose “Use Wizard to Create report.” That gives us the wizards dialog.
This is like the form. We choose what fields that we want on this report by clicking on them and clicking the move button, >. We can also click the >> button which moves them all. Click next when you got the fields that you want for this report.
Now you can set what you want the report to use as a label for the fields. Here is where you make the field names more human readable. Click next when you get what you want.
The next page is to select the field that you want to use for any groups you want to build. Make sure that if you use more than one field that the more important field is on top. When you get what you want, click next.
Now you need to select any additional fields that you wish to sort by. Once you get everything the way you want it, click on next.
Choose one of the layouts to build a report you want. You can move the dialog away from the design surface if you want to see what it will look like. When you get it the way you want, click on next.
Static report is a report that is frozen with data at a certain point. If you want to run the report with new data then you want a dynamic report. Make sure that you give the report a good name. When everything is ready then click on finish.
I used a large table field-wise to try and generate a report, but the idea is there. Need a desktop database, but can’t spend the money? Try OpenOffice/NeoOffice Base. there are plenty of wizards to get you over the initial hurdle. The Base product’s usefulness does not end here, as you will see in future posts.
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