One of the most versatile functions of the FSPC program is the User Defined Reports tool. This allows you to create any report that is not included in the program. To get to this area, click on the Output menu and select User Defined Reports.

To look at the list of User Defined Reports that are in the system, click on the Reports button on the top left of the window. These reports include Past Offices, Service Program, Member Transactions, Council Transactions, Members and Council, All Applied Payments, and Phone List.

Let’s add a report to the program. We will create a Roster for the program. To do this click on Add. This will clear the information on the screen. Click in the box beside the Reports button - type in Roster as the name of the report.

Next click on the Group button. This will bring up a list of the member groups or queries. This is where you select who (which group/query) you want to include in the report. For our purposes, we will use the group Associate & Insurance since we want to see active members. The gray box to the right of Group shows how many members are in that group.

You should select the Data Source that you will use to pull the fields from. The one that you want for this report is Members. This will allow you to pull from all of your Member Information screens. If you want Page Numbers to print on the report, click Print Page Numbers. If you want a Run Date to appear on the report, click on Print Run Date. Both of these are located on the upper right of the window.

In the Fields section, click on Add. This will bring up a list of the Fields in the data source.

Here, in the Data Source Fields window, you select the Fields you want to include on the User Defined Report. For our Roster, select the following fields, one at a time:

NAME – MEMBER’S FULL

MEMBER NUMBER

ADDRESS – LINE 1

ADDRESS – LINE 2 (If you are using both address lines)

CITY

POSTAL CODE/ZIP CODE

PHONE – HOME NUMBER

DEGREE

LAST NAME

You can add or remove from the list as you see fit. If you make a mistake, you can click on the wrong field and click the Remove button.

The User Defined Report field width is set for the longest part of the field. This will usually be the field’s title. You can shorten this by clicking on the field name on the left, and then clicking in the Title box on the right under Field Details. Here you can title the field with anything you choose. For example, instead of NAME – MEMBER’S FULL, you could delete all but NAME. Now the field will be as wide as your longest name.

If you want to sort by a field, click on that field and then click on Sort on the right. You can sort Ascending (A to Z or 1 to 10) or Descending (Z to A or 10 to 1). Total Field will add a column of numbers and put the total at the end of the report.

If you select Suppress Printing, the field selected will not show up on the report. This is good if you want to sort by a field, but you do not want to print that field. We are going to use that technique in this report. Click on the field LAST NAME. Since we have the last name already printing in the NAME – MEMBER’S FULL, we will only use LAST NAME to sort. Then click on Sort, Ascending, and Suppress Printing. This will sort by the members’ last name but will not print that field.

If you want to Group the report by certain fields, click on Group Report and select the field you want to group by in the pull down menu. You can use this to group the report by degree, for example. You can add Sub Totals, Page Breaks, or lines printed between each record, by clicking on any of those items.

The last area we need to look at is the Output To section. If you want to view the output first, click on Screen. If you just want the output to go to the printer, click on Printer. You can also send the output to a Text File or a Data File. The Data Files you can output to include a Comma Delimited text file, Dbase III compatible, Lotus worksheet, or an Excel worksheet. These can be used if you want to import the information in the report to another database or spreadsheet – simply type in the location where you want the report to be saved. Then go into your database or spreadsheet program and open up that file.

1/30/02