 Hello everyone, thanks for attending today. My name is Ryan Minook and I'm a Solutions Consultant here at FileMaker. Joining me is Rosemary T.G., a Consulting Engineer who will cover some best practices and tips for creating FileMaker reports. But before we begin, let's spend the first minute or two going over some brief housekeeping notes. It's strongly recommended that you participate in this web seminar with at least a broadband connection. If you have any problems or require online assistance at any time, please contact Citrix Technical Support at 888-259-8414. Now throughout today's presentation you'll have the opportunity to type in and ask questions, so let's talk about briefly how to do that. Go to the control panel, click on the question section, enter your question and click send. Now we'll try to enter as many as time allows at the end of our presentation, but remember you don't need to wait until then to submit a question. The FileMaker training series is FileMaker's official training curriculum focusing on increasing your knowledge and level of comfort with the features and benefits of the FileMaker platform. And it's broken down into easy to follow modules as shown on your screen. But for today's webinar, we're going to take sample files provided by the training series and take a deeper dive into the best practices and tips covered in the reporting module. And with that, it is my pleasure to introduce FileMaker Consulting Engineer Rosemary T.G. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Ryan. And today I'm going to talk about, as Ryan said, the report section of the FileMaker training series. And just to go over a high-level outline of what I'm going to cover, I'm going to start with why do we report and then talk about some of the ad hoc reporting you can do with FileMaker right out of the gate. And then I'll take a deeper dive into the most common reports we see in FileMaker users and customers creating the basic subsummary report. And then I'll talk a little bit about quick charts and give a demonstration of those and wrap up with the Q&A and point you to some additional resources if you want to take a deeper dive into learning more about reporting. So we report so that we can get meaning out of the data and the information we store in our FileMaker systems. So here's an Excel spreadsheet. This is a screenshot of the spreadsheet that I'll be using throughout the demonstration, and that is part of the materials provided for the exercises in the FileMaker training series basics. And it's a bunch of records, about 30 rows of asset information. But if I want to dive in and find out, well, how many computers do we have, or what's the value of each category of asset that we have, it's really hard to do this in Excel. With FileMaker, we can quickly create a report that shows us that in the Appliances category, we have $600 in assets. In the Camera category, we have $1,200 and so on throughout all the assets in the system. And that report will be flexible and it will grow as the assets in our inventory grow. In addition, you can create a visual representation of that same information and get even a deeper look and do a quick category comparison to see just very quickly how many cameras do we have versus how many computers or how many pieces of office furniture and get that very quick visual representation and build a dashboard or other report that you can hand to management or executives. So, again, to wrap up, we create reports because we have all this data. We have this information locked up in a FileMaker system and reporting lets us get meaning from it, which will then let us take action and make better business decisions. So, I'm going to start by talking a little bit about the ad hoc reports you can do in FileMaker in TableView. With TableView, you can quickly find records and quickly drill in and get some information out of data. So, let me jump over to FileMaker and dive into that. So, I'm going to go ahead and open the asset spreadsheet. Here it is in Excel. And as you can see, there's about 30 records here and I've got a header row. And I'm going to just drag and drop this onto FileMaker Pro. And FileMaker Pro, when you convert in Excel spreadsheet, first says, asks you, is the first row column headers or field names or is it data? And in this case, as you saw, it's field names. So, what FileMaker is going to do now is create a new file for me and name the fields based on those column headers in Excel. And I'm just going to call this assets converted and save it in my documents folder. And here it is. So, for these quick ad hoc reports, I can do things like a simple control click or right click in a field where I want to find all the espresso machines. So, I'm just going to go down here and select find matching records. And I now see that out of my 29 assets, I have three espresso machines and each one of them costs $100. But imagine if I had a lot more records, I may not be able to quickly add up in my head that I have this many espresso machines. So, I want to get a total. So, I'm going to add a trailing subtotal of the espresso machines. And now I got a row at the bottom of my TableView report here that shows me that the total value of the cost for my found set is $300. Now, if I go and show all my records again, you'll see now I've got $10,425 in my total. So, that total is going to be flexible. It adds up whatever is in my found set. I can also sort right here in TableView by simply clicking again in the header arrow and choose sort ascending by category. And then once I've got things sorted, I can add a group or an extra row. So, I'm going to go ahead and add that group. And I can take that group by again, control-clicking or right-clicking and change the color. So, maybe I'll just make that a pale yellow so it stands out. But now you see my subtotal, because I already had that total in the cost column, it has picked up the subtotals for my categories. So now I've got that report my boss asked me for of what's the total cost of our assets by every category. And I can quickly, I could print this out or I could say this is a PDF. But, you know, I may want to make this something that looks a little neater. It doesn't so much look like TableView or look like Excel. I want something that looks nicer, has a little more formatting, and also is something that my boss can do on his own. And that's where the basic FileMaker Summary Report or Sub-Summary Report comes in. So, with Sub-Summary Reports, I'm essentially, I'm going to group data by a single field value or variable. The FileMaker materials frequently call that a break field. And over time, you'll be able to make many reports from the same layout just by changing the found set. And I'll talk more about that toward the end of the demo. And then with the Sub-Summary Report, you've also got the option to include totals if you need them. And that final thing about Sub-Summary Reports is it's really important to be reporting from the right context or the right table. And you set that up when you create the layouts for your Sub-Summary Reports. And so again, here's my spreadsheet, my starting point. There's no organization, it's just a list of assets with their purchase dates and costs. With a little bit of work in Excel, I can start to create that Sub-Summary Report. I've just moved the category column over to the left and made that into a break field. But I don't have any totals yet. And managing this over time would be really difficult, especially if I have many people doing data entry, because you'd need to automatic, like I can't just add now to the end of the list in Excel. I need to insert my new rows under the right category in order for this to be a useful report. And if I jump over and create this in FileMaker, now I have that flexible report where I can add a new record and it will automatically then sort into the right category of the report, automatically be added to the totals. And I don't have to do any additional work. So let's now talk a little bit about the anatomy of the FileMaker Sub-Summary Report. So this is the report, this is sort of the top half of the report. And that is a leading Sub-Summary part, which is my category where all I've got in there is the category label or the field that is that category appliances in this case for the first group. And then down below that, I have a trailing Sub-Summary part, which includes again that label, that category field, and also the total or the subtotal for the cost of all of the assets in the appliances category. At the very top of the screen, when I'm looking at this on a computer or at the very top of the every page, if I print this report, is the header. And in this, I've got a label telling me what is this, this is the asset report. And then all of my column headers. And then finally, if I were to scroll my screen down to the bottom, you'll see at the very bottom of my screen, I have what we call the footer row, or the footer. And that would print at the bottom of every page or stick at the bottom of the computer screen if you're viewing on screen. So let's talk a little bit more about the Sub-Summary parts themselves. Those parts are used to group the records and reports, and they only display when the records in the found set are sorted. If their records are not sorted, you'll just see the body and not any Sub-Summary reports. And as you saw in those previous, that previous example, it can be very helpful to have two Sub-Summary parts for every field you're sorting by on the layout. You have that leading Sub-Summary part to start your subgroup and provide the category label or other information about that category. And then you also have a trailing group to end that Sub-Summary subgroup and contain any subtotals or counts that you want to add. And a little bit more about what field data is displayed in Sub-Summary parts. If I have a leading Sub-Summary part, I'm going to display the data from the first record in my subgroup. If I have a trailing Sub-Summary part, I'm going to show the data from the last record in each subgroup. So it's really important to only include your category data or the data that's the same across the entire subgroup in each Sub-Summary part. And a final point is you don't want to allow users to edit data in those parts because they're not actually going to be editing across the entire category, they're just going to be editing in either the first or last record. And including other data can really cause confusion. In this screenshot I've added the purchase date to my leading and trailing Sub-Summary parts. And as you can see now in the leading Sub-Summary row or part, I've got appliances, which is my category, but I've also got the purchase date of that first record in the subgroup. And then in the trailing Sub-Summary part, I've got the purchase date for the last record in the subgroup. And then the common information of the appliances in the sub-total. So again, including those fields that are not common across the entire subgroup can lead to confusion simply because you don't know instinctively or users aren't going to recognize that that additional data is not coming across the whole subgroup, it's just coming from the adjacent row. The other key element of a Sub-Summary report is the summary fields themselves. And a summary field is a special field type in FileMaker that aggregates data across a group or subgroup of records. Calculation fields do math across a or do a calculation or operations across all the data in a specific record or row in FileMaker, whereas summary fields aggregate in a single column or field across all of the records in a found set. The most commonly used summary field types are total, average and count. Total and average can only be performed on number fields or date fields and count can be used on any field type and will count up any field that has data in it. One other tip I have is that you only need to have one summary field per data field in your database because the way summary fields work is depending on where they're placed on a layout they behave a little bit differently. If a summary field is placed in the header, footer, body or a grand summary part it will aggregate all the records in a found set. And if you place it in a sub summary part it will aggregate only for that subgroup. So now let's dive in and work through the exercise in the training series. And again I'm using the exact steps that are outlined in the FileMaker training series basics. Exercise are example 16.1 and I'm using the files that are provided as part of the training series basics. And I think later on we'll make the link to download both the training series basics and these activity files for you. So the nice thing about FileMaker 13 is the wizard walks you through all the steps when you create a new record and or when you create a new layout. So it will create your sub summary parts automatically. It will help point you to how to create a summary field if you need it and it will also create a script so that your report will always display the way you expect it to. Now I had it hide so I'm going to close up my assets converted and I'm going to go ahead and open up the equipment rentals example. So when I start you know I'm looking at the asset details so here's all my assets and I'm more nicely organized layout and I'm just going to go into layout mode and create a new layout or report and for this I want to show records from assets and I'm going to call it my asset report and I'm going to choose to display this on a computer and as you see if I choose computer I should get options down here at the bottom that tell me what do I want it to be and for some reason FileMaker is not cooperating with me. I can also select printer and here you'll see I've got options for labels, vertical labels, envelopes or report. So if you ever do need to print mailing labels you can go ahead and use the wizard to walk through the steps to create labels and it will ask you questions like what fields you want to include on the labels and what label template are you going to use and a little properly size them for a vast array of commonly available labels. But in this case I'm going to select report and choose continue and now the report wizard starts and it asks me questions like do I want to include sub totals and grand totals and of course yes yes I do and now I'm going to specify the fields I want to include in this report by simply double-clicking I'm going to move over asset ID, the item, the purchase date, the in-service date, the cost and the category and if I get these not in the right order I can use these little arrows to move things up and down in the order and this is going to be the order they appear on my report left to right in columns. I can also say oh I don't actually want to include this and go ahead and click clear to pull something out that I didn't mean to include. Once I have my fields selected I'm going to go ahead and click next and now I'm going to specify the category so I'm going to go ahead and categorize this report by category and this checkbox right here will turn on or off including the category field in the body of my report as well. So I would see it in both my subsummary part and also in the body. In this case I'm going to pull the category out of the body because I don't want to repeat it in every row and again I'm going to click next and now I'm going to choose additional sort fields. So because I'm sorting by category and summarizing by category I need that in my sort order and I'm also going to add in-service date for this report. I'm going to go ahead and click next and now I can specify the subtotals or the summary fields I want to include in my report. So I'm going to go ahead and click specify and look and I see there's no summary fields specified in this table yet so I'm going to add one and I'm going to call this cost total and my tip what I like to do when I name my summary fields is I name them by what is the field I'm summarizing in this case cost and then what is the summary I am doing the total the average the count etc. And that way it will if I show my fields in alphabetical order cost will be immediately followed by any summary fields in this case cost total. I'm going to go ahead and click OK and click OK again and now I'm saying okay I've got a summary field cost total summarizing category and I want to put that subtotal below my record group and I'm going to go ahead and add that subtotal. It's the only one I need for this report right now so I'm going to click next and now I'm going to choose that same summary field I just created my cost total and add it as a grand total at the end of the report. So now I'll have all my subgroups and then I'll have a grand total at the bottom of my report. I'm going to go ahead and click next and now I can specify any additional information beyond the field labels or the column heads that I want to include in my header and footer. So in my header I'm going to also include my layout name which is asset report in the top left and down in the bottom right on the footer. I'm going to include a placeholder that will always display the current date and again I'm going to click next and the last step is do I want a script for this report? And you almost always are going to want to script because it will give users a way to quickly get to that layout and sort the records properly to display any summary parts you've included and if I check automatically it will run always if a user just navigates to the asset report layout and I do want that to happen. So I'm going to go ahead and click finish and now FileMaker leaves me in my report in layout mode so I can do some tweaking. So as you can see I've got some things that are cut off. My asset report is cut off and since I had to choose a print layout because of something weird happening I'm going to go ahead and also change the theme from enlightened print to enlightened just because I think that looks a little bit nicer and it's a little easier to read on screen. I'm going to drag out this and I'm just going to do a few more things to line things up. So I'm going to grab all my fields make them taller so that I can see everything in them. I'm going to move over my cost and my cost column, the label and the subtotal. Just base things out a little bit more so that it looks a little bit nicer and then the last thing I'm going to do with the cost is format this as currency since it is currency data and to get to that formatting I'm going to select the data tab of the inspector and scroll down to the data formatting area and choose to format as currency with two decimal digits and the thousand separator to make this easier to read. Then I'm going to go over to the appearance tab and choose write paragraph alignment for that cost column and the the total and sub and the two totals and that's simply because that's how we expect to see numbers displayed and the last thing I'm going to do is move that category label over at the bottom so it's closer. I'm all done so I'm going to save that report and go into browse mode. Now you can see my report but I don't have my some subsummary parts. What happened? It's because when you move from lambo to browse mode I don't run that script so I can just go ahead and run my asset report script now that FileMaker so kindly created for me and now I have my report so I've got my header I've got my leading subsummary part I've got my body of all the record data that falls under the appliance category and then at the bottom I have my trailing subsummary for appliances with the label and the subtotal and then the same for the camera group same for the computers group and so on and as you see my header is staying up at the top stuck my footer down here at the bottom is staying stuck with today's date if I scroll all the way to the end of this you'll see there's my grand total of ten thousand dollars in all of my assets so that's how to create a basic subsummary report and of course you could probably do it much more quickly than I did if you're not talking about what you're doing every step of the way so now you've got your layout set up and you may want to go back and edit your parts you may decide well I don't really need that trailing subsummary part I just want to move my total up or you may want to add additional subsummary parts so you can also go back and edit layout parts after the fact and if you're in layout mode that use the layouts part setup dialog box which looks like this and it shows you all the parts that are included in your layout and anything with a lock has to be in the order it is and anything with the arrow you can move up and down and then I can click the create button to create a new subsummary part if I need it and that brings up the part definition dialog and so in this example I've said oh I want to add a subsummary when sorted by customer name and then you have a few other options as well you can choose to put a page break before every occurrence of a subsummary part and that lets you do things like print a report for invoices overdue for all salespeople and then distribute them by salesperson so you hand each salesperson that report or I've done examples where I'm creating a whole lot of classroom rosters for students enrolled in a group of courses and I want to be able to sort by either the course or the instructor name so I can hand that roster to each instructor so I can print everybody at the same time rather than having to do each class individually and I'll let's talk a little bit more about summary fields you can edit and create summary fields via the managed database dialog box or via adding fields in the new file maker 13 field picker and then once you add that summary field you'll see the options where you can choose which summary field you want to what type of summary field you want to create and then what field it is you want to summarize just as you do when you're using the layout or report wizard so that I hope is a good introduction to file makers most common report type some summary report and now let's talk a little bit about charting so as you can see in this iPad dashboard image it's very nice to have that visual display of information and it's possible to put many charts in file maker on a single layout for this example though I'm going to use quick charting to create a simple chart and put it on a layout so as we talked about earlier charts really give you a visual display of data and aggregate it up to do something informative to make it easy to understand your data and to show relationships in data things like price changes over time or relative performance of people or you know a breakdown of assets and the easiest way to get to charts in file maker is by working with the quick chart set up quick charts are great because they give end users the ability to create charts on the fly ad hoc right at their fingertips and I like to use quick charts as a starting point for a chart I'm going to put on a layout either as a standalone chart layout or as part of a bigger dashboard quick charts can use you can start from any view in browse mode it can be a list view a table view or a form view and to get to quick charts you just simply right click in the field you want to chart by and quick charts is easiest for setting up simple charts like column and bar charts pie charts line charts or area charts so let's dive in and do a quick chart demo of creating a simple column chart so I'm going to be I'm back in my equipment rental solution and I'm already looking at my asset report and I want to see the relative number of assets that I have in each category so I'm already sorted by category so this is great so I can just click right into any any field actually I need to do this where I can click into the category field which I cannot hear so I'm going to go back to my asset details layout but my data is already sorted so I'm going to now click into my category and right click and you see down here in my contextual menu I have the option to chart by category I'm going to go ahead and select that and I've now got a preview of what my chart is going to look like if I have a really big data set or really slow network connection back to a server I can choose to use sample data instead of actual data but most of the time I choose to use it's actual data and as you can see I've got these hot zones on my chart preview where I can set things I'm related to that part of the chart you know what labels do I want to use on this x-axis what do I want to call my x-axis title well I want to call my chart not category count I want to call it assets by category and so if you saw when I clicked on that it gave me the area in the chart inspector where I can type in the new title and so I want to use this I'm going to keep this as a column chart but as you can see we have many other options as well and then I've got some other options so once I've got the basic information my chart set up I can go ahead and close that part of the inspector and bring up the styles so when I'm looking at the styles I can choose well what do I want my chart to look like do I want the solid flat lines or do I want you know solid 3d columns or shaded 3d columns and so on I can choose the background fill if I want to change the background color and I can also change the color scheme so FileMaker will usually select a color scheme that you know matches well with on the theme you have selected but you can always change that to a different color scheme and then I'm going to go ahead and if I'm an end user and I don't have layout creation privileges in a solution I can go ahead from here and just choose to print that chart print it to paper or save it as a PDF and I've got that snapshot view of a chart as a database administrator or developer I can also go ahead and save this chart as a layout because it's something that other people may want to use or may want access to so I'm going to go ahead and do that and save this chart as a layout and included in the layouts menu so now what I've got is my new chart my new layout here with a chart as you can see it it's all there I have to scroll it a little bit on my screen but there it is it's a new layout and when you create a chart FileMaker creates a charts folder and then drops all those new layouts into that charts layout folder so as you can see I've got that chart set up and one tip about charts is if I go in and unsort these records I get something that really doesn't look like what I expected and so one tip for troubleshooting charts is if you see a chart where you've got a whole lot more bars than you expect and they're all the same height that implies that you're doing some sort of chart based on summary fields and in order for those summary fields to give you the subtotals or this that you're looking for you need that data to be sorted so I'm going to go ahead and click sort sort by category and in service state just like I was before and as soon as I sort you'll see my chart comes back I'm going to go ahead and close that window and go back to the presentation so just a few closing thoughts as I wrap up the demonstration portion of this seminar always begin with the end in mind when you're building reports think about what's that end result you want to get to I want to see a summary a categorization of my assets by type I want to see invoices by salesperson or invoices by quarter and it's also helpful to just kind of pencil and paper map out the report you're looking for or if you've already got reports that are produced in Excel or in another format look at those reports and then mimic them or recreate them in FileMaker and it's a lot easier to start with that roadmap of where you want to go than with a completely blank screen one other tip is play to the strengths of FileMaker FileMaker is really good as you saw at subsummary reports things like crosstab reports or pivot tables are possible to do in FileMaker but they require some calculates some calculation skills and a little bit more heavy lifting and if that is something you're interested in doing the FileMaker training series advanced reporting module has some exercise in is an examples of how to set up that kind of report and finally when you're thinking about reports separate the presentation or the report layouts from the data that's presented in those reports and what I mean by that is the same layout can frequently give you many different reports simply by changing the found set that you're looking at you know so for example I created this report of all our assets for my boss he said oh that's great but one thing I'd really like to know now is how many assets are we going to need to replace in the next couple of months because we have a business rule that says we have a three year replacement cycle from the purchase date of an asset so can you show me all the assets that we have right now that are already three years old so yeah I can do that I can find those records I'm gonna go into find mode here and on my purchase date I'm just gonna say find everything where the purchase date is less than three years ago which is 8 20 2011 and I'm gonna go ahead and perform that find and now if I switch over to my asset report layout that asset report is only going to show the 10 records in my found set right now so I go over to that asset report I see that well we have you know those 10 records and we have you know two appliances with a total value of $250 and so on and the total that we need to replace is $2,350 so that's what we need to plan for in the budget as we go get ready to replace and he may also say well how many assets are in each category this is a short enough list I can probably do it just by counting but if I had hundreds of assets if I had a hundred in my found set instead of just 10 that's where my chart can be really helpful I'm gonna go over and look at that and now I see well the biggest category we need to replace is office furniture followed by you know telephone's camera and appliances all the same and then computers luckily we only have to replace one of those those are the most expensive asset that we have in our inventory so with that I'm gonna turn the control back over to Ryan and we'll answer all the questions that I'm sure you have all been busily entering as I've been talking thanks Rosemary has a fantastic presentation we covered a lot of information here so if you have a question go to the go to webinar control panel click on the question section enter question and click on send so let's go ahead and get started and the first question that we have is Rosemary can you go a little bit more in-depth in the difference between the pivot tables and the cross tab reports so pivot tables and cross tab reports are essentially synonyms for the same thing I mean it's essentially it's a report where you're looking instead of in a sub summary report I'm looking at a list and I'm grouping things together in a pivot table I may be doing a secondary categorization you know so I'm thinking a common common when we we do in our in our everyday work is we look at sales by salesperson and quarter so down the left edge of my report I have all my salespeople and then my in a traditional sub summary report I then have subgroups for each quarter under that salesperson and in a pivot table or a cross tab report I actually pull those subtotals up to the top so across the top I will have q1 q2 q3 q4 and then I'll just include the totals there and get rid of the body data of the specifics of each invoice and again the best way to learn how to do those is to use the example that's in the file maker training series advanced excellent okay the next question can you lock a report so that other users cannot sort it so can you flock a report so that other users cannot sort it what you can do is you know have it sort by default but users are always going to have access to the sort command in file maker so they could resort that report and get you know a different result as you saw the summary parts are just going to go away if they unsort or sort it in some other sort order than the one provided for your report okay the next question can I create reports on two different categories yes that's a great question and let me show you how you would create a report on two different categories so I'm going to go back to my equipment rentals example here and as we saw we made our asset report and here our categories were appliances or I mean the category was the asset category if I actually have in addition to the things I'm showing on this report right now is I also have customers so maybe I want to see my assets broken down by the first first by the asset category and then also by the customer so I can see you know which customer has which category and how those categories are broken down by customer so let me go ahead and show you how to do that so I'm going to go edit my report layout here and here I'm going to bring up that part setup dialogue I mentioned earlier and I'm going to create two additional subsummary parts when I sort by customer ID so there's customer ID I'm going to create it once and say printed above my body and there you can see it now and now I'm going to create a second one to be my trailing so I'm going to sort by the same customer ID and print below and then one other tip for best performance of subsummary reports you want to have the pairs of subsummary parts going out kind of in order stacked like layers of an onion from the body so first I have the body in the middle and then the next layer out I have my two customer ID subsummary parts and then out from that I have my category subsummary parts you want to have them stacked in that mirror image order as it turns out it doesn't matter what order they are in the part setup they're only going to display in the order based on how you sort your report so I'm going to click done here and then I'm going to do a little bit of work here I'm going to add my subtotal I'm just using the option drag command to duplicate it and put that into my subsummary when sorted by customer and I'm going to bring up the field picker and bring out a couple more fields I don't need any labels here so I'm going to bring out the customer ID field right here and then also go grab the company name for the customers get rid of the field picker and then I'm just going to bring again I'm going to bring that customer name down here so it's in that trailing subsummary part as well so now I've got my data picked up and the other thing I'm going to do is maybe I want to change just for clarity I'm going to change the background fill color of this of my customer subsummary parts to just be a little bit darker blue and I'm going to do that for both the leading and trailing parts so we have a little so you can see a little bit better what's happening in my report so now when I go back into browse mode you'll notice you'll remember when I was first sorted I was only sorted by category so I'm only seen my category so I'm going to go ahead and show all my records and sort this again this time by category and then customer ID and then in service state so now when I sort this you'll see I have my my subgroups my secondary categories coming in so first I have my appliances group then I have my customer subgroup and then one espresso machine at Mountaineer wine shop then I've got my next customer and their appliance assets and so on and as you can see I have a little error here that my customer IDs are showing as currency but that's easy to fix later and I'm going to go ahead and sort again this time I'm going to pull category completely out of my sort order and just sort by customer and now I can see assets assigned to each customer and you see now I've only got my customer subsummary parts my final option is to change that sort again I can sort by customer and then by category and if I do that what I'll see is I'll see my customer parts on the outside and then broken down by assets broken down by category inside of each customer subgroup and so again if I go up to the top first customer is Westside antiques they have computer and a telephone thousand dollars worth of assets assigned to them next is the Mountaineer wine shop and they have a whole bunch of assets assigned to them next is Abbott securities and so on and so again you can use a single report layout to create all kinds of different subsummary reports simply by varying the sort order and including or not including specific categorization fields in that sort order and then also as we saw earlier by changing the data in the found set or the records in the found set to change the data that's presented on that report perfect explanation thank you okay so our next question do you need to create a separate report layout for printing and viewing on a computer so you do not need to create a separate report layout for printing and viewing on a computer but you may want to simply because you know this report layout would print fine to a color printer but you're going to use a lot of toner and it's sometimes hard to read a printed page that has a lot of shading happening so we do generally recommend creating separate reports for printing in and computer but it's not a requirement if you do want to use the same layout for both my recommendation would be to stick with a print friendly layout that doesn't have you know that black black shading in the header and so on simply because then you'll get something that is easier to read when printed as well as on screen and kind of in the same vein do you have to create multiple layouts for you know an iOS device for example or will FileMaker automatically take the reports that you created and resize them so FileMaker can resize the reports for an iPad pretty easily if it's created for an on-screen view for the iPhone you're probably going to want to create a specific layout for that tiny form size you know but one thing to think about is you know in general when you're out and about with your iPhone you're not going to probably want to look at the full report of all the assets you may want to see a quick chart of you know how our assets distributed amongst our customers or you know a quick you know high-level view but you're not going to be looking at this full complete report one one other solution for showing reports on iOS devices is to rather than trying to show them in FileMaker go use a print layout and save a PDF so then you can quickly send out your reports from your iOS device and get them distributed to your customers for example for a service contract or a work order or an invoice you can just because you can't see it well on FileMaker go you can still create a PDF from FileMaker go that is a more standard eight and a half by 11 inch piece of paper size and then attach that PDF to an email and send it out from FileMaker go excellent and our last question of the day Rosemary can I use portals on my reports so you can use portals on your reports but it's not really recommended and the reason for that is when you set up a portal on a report or on a layout you have to specify I'm going to include five rows so now what do you do if your portal has more rows than five in your report when you're thinking about context for reporting you want to always go down to the deepest or the deepest record level or the deepest table level for that report and base your report on that table you know so for example if you want to do an invoice report where you include line items from that invoice you'd want to base your report on the line items table rather than the invoices table you know or if you're looking at student data where you have three tables one for students one for classes and then a table in the middle what we call a join table for enrollments you'd want to print your class rosters from that enrollments table and then categorize or summarize based on you know either students if you're printing a student schedule or bait or you know the class title or the course number if you're printing a roster excellent and before we continue just I wanted to direct everyone's attention to the go-to webinar control panel in the chat section we've posted the link to the filemaker training basic series where you can download the activity files that Rosemary used today and so just to wrap up again I want to thank everyone for coming I just want to talk about some of the resources that that I've mentioned as part of the presentation and then also some additional resources that are great for pointing you toward best practices for reports and charts I'm first again the filemaker training series basics covers quick charts and the simple subsummary report in the reporting section and then the filemaker training series advanced reports module goes it but into much deeper detail on creating more advanced subsummary reports where you do multiple levels of categorization and then also creating pivot tables and other you know other tips and tricks for reporting and charting and training series basics is free you've now got the link to download both the ebook and the exercise files and advanced is available for a small charge and you can learn more about that from the website on your screen another excellent resource for anyone doing filemaker development or learning more who wants to learn more about filemaker is the free filemaker technical network on this is our developer community there are extensive forums where you can get tips from expert users from around the world I know back in the day when I was a filemaker developer I'd post a question before I left work on the east coast of you know I'm trying to solve this problem how do I do it and when I came back in in the morning early morning I'd frequently have an answer from a developer in Australia or New Zealand or somewhere in Europe who'd seen my question when I was asleep and you know very kindly taken time to answer that question in addition there's a bunch of free resources available to tech net members only including technical briefs like our very extensive technical brief on charting and that tech brief covers all the different chart types available on filemaker and when you'd best want to use them and then how to set them up and then how to go from creating a simple chart on a layout to a more complex dashboard where you include many charts and other performance indicators on a single layout and we also have many members only educational web seminars like this one but on a deeper technical level and we also release periodically recordings of sessions from our developer conference so again it's free to join at fmdev.filemaker.com and finally some additional resources on filemaker.com forward slash support forward slash webinars you can see information about upcoming web seminars and also see recordings of all the prior seminars that we've done like this one and also in addition to the filemaker training series training resources we have partners all around the world who teach courses in a classroom based on the training series materials and some of them also do coaching so the classroom training is great if you're trying to learn the basics and the you know intricacies of filemakers use for things like reporting and charting and the one on one coaching can be great if you have a specific reporting problem or challenge that you're trying to solve and you want an expert to point you along the way to how would you solve this problem best and then give you the skills at the same time so you can do that again with other reporting challenges and in addition some of our training partners have done online video training for the websites linda.com and vtc.com and when I talk to people who are learning filemaker they report to me that linda.com and the vtc.com videos are some of the most helpful things they've have looked for or they have used as they learn about how to do things in filemaker so that's you know the end of the content we have today I want to again thank all of you for coming and spending about an hour with us and I hope this material was helpful and I would ask you to please send us feedback and let us know if this was a valuable session and we actually did this reporting seminar based on feedback from some of our other seminars we've done over the last year when it turned out that reporting was the one question everybody had the most about so we decided to pull together some resources and present this as a seminar based on that feedback so thanks again for coming and have a great day