Report Designer

Report designer allows you to make needed design for your report template, add images, text, links, etc. After making a report template with Report Wizard you will need to use Report Designer to edit it and make it more user friendly. Simple template made with Report Wizard will contain only fields' details that were selected for the report. The Report Designer will help you to add there other content describing your services or the purpose of this report.

 The following example shows how to create a report template with Report Designer tool.
 




1. Using Report Wizard choose Standard Report.
2.Columns to display in our report will be: Contact, Department, Title and Company.
3. Let's make Contact column to be as a group level.
4.In the next window we will choose Outline 1 as a layout and Landscape as orientation.
5.Style for our report will be Bold.
6.The title for our report will be "Dial IT professional".
If you change your mind about names of fields, slyles e.t.c., you can change them in Report Designer easily.As a result you will see this window of report designer. Callouts point to important areas.






You can preview you report by clicking HTML View or Preview icons.






Let's come back to our report designer by clicking on the Designer button.We will add our template body to the field right after the area with Company, Department and Title data. In our template the name of this fied is "DetailBand1".





Every template consists of different blocks with text, images, diagrams. All blocks in Report Designer may be easilymoved within template from one place to another. With the help of your mouse you can change the size of the blocks. You can write text to the block and change font name, font size, font style, font color and alignment with the help of these icons in the top menu:  
As a sample let's click on two Contact fields in DroupHeaderBand1 at the top of our template and move it down to DetailBand1. In the first field let's change the text from "Contact" to "Dear". Let's also make second field wider and change font style.

==>

1.Establish linkage between block and ACT! data. For example when you send one template to different ACT! contacts, Report Designer will put correct name of current contact, his contact details or history data.
2.You can download data to the block (e.g. picture or text in .rtf or .txt format).
As a sample let's change contact name "Chris Huffman" to Salutation, so the text will be "Dear Chris". For this you should press  icon and choose Salutation in Data Binding field.






You can create blocks by selecting icons on Standard Controls panel (on the left) and moving them to the template body.
As a sample let's create a text for Dial IT Professional presentation. You can do it with the help of Lable icon or Rich Text icon.
You can write the text or paste it. You can take text from ACT! database or download a file.
Lable icon allows you to apply text formatting for the text. However you cannot edit the part of the text block because font style will be the same withing one block.
Rich Text icon allows you to put it's own font name, font size, font style, font color and alignment for every sentense or for every word. Here you can also download text in rtf or txt formats.
In our sample we need Rich Text icon. So we move it to the template with mouse and paste the text. For the first sentence we will choose different text style.






Then we may move our text block to the right side of the template and download picture to the left side.





IMPORTANT: To be sure that the images are visible on the customer's side please download all images to FTP server and use Image URL Links, e.g.: www.addons-for-act.de/Images/boxes/dialit.png

Usually you need to write the names of the pictures in small letters and without spaces: 





Below the picture let's put URL link to Dial IT manual.







Finally our report is ready.