In creating an Order Action Report within OE, there appear to be some limitations (?) (Maybe mine!) which I?m hoping you can help me overcome.

1. Getting report totals. Is there a way to get a total value at the end of the report? I get a summary of purchases for a series of items, but no final total which would be useful. I need to know my sales totals for a particular category or vendor. When I created this report, I was forced to add up the sales values manually. It seems like it should be so easy to get the report to total.
2. Exporting the report - I tried exporting the report to an excel file so that I would be able to total columns that way, but it doesn?t export neatly ? the columns don?t separate. (When there was a report preview on my screen, there was an export option icon at the top.
I tried exporting to an excel file, to a lotus file, and even to a csv file which I then brought into excel ? but got nothing I could use. The columns from the report would not separate into columns in Excel. Is there a way to resolve this? Thanks.

(I am trying to create an Order Action report in Gridview - but that's a whole new set of challenges and fodder for different posts!)

Hi Marion

Although this response doesn't actually resolve your Order Action limitations, I do have to write to tell you that since you own GridView, that is by far the best place to go to get the report you want, especially since you want to export to Excel.

You are correct that this report is not a simple one to create, mainly because the OE data tables are not structured nicely (e.g, orders, invoices and credit notes are mixed together in the same table, and credit note amounts show as positives). But GridView is an easy tool to master and use, so there is hope. A clue - select the Composite Table, not the OE, module when creating a new view.

Steve Schwartz

Hello Marion,

What columns have you chosen to print on this report? Perhaps I might be able to help you design a useful View.

I agree about exporting to Excel through Crystal. Unfortunately, Crystal does not really "understand" the information that is printed on the report, so it has to guess at the column alignment. The information often needs substantial cleaning up. I've forwarded the suggestion for Grand totals on the report to R&D.