Designing and Printing Reports

Reporting is a standard way to present and share your information with other people. Strata provides this functionality with an easy-to-use report writer. You can take a data set and create simple or complex reports in minutes. You can then either print them out or create PDF files to share or store electronically.

Like each of the other document types in the software, the Report Writer provides different views of the same data. The first view is a design view, which provides a template for the report. The second view is a layout view, which is sort of an editable print preview. The layout view shows you what your final report looks like, but also gives you the tools to make additional editing and formatting changes without leaving the view. Toggling back and forth between these two views provides a method for quickly generating and editing your reports. Once the report is ready, you can save it for future use or print it out or create a PDF file for easy sharing.

Creating a New Report

To create a new, blank report, simply select New > Report from the File menu. To save a report, simple select File > Save and name your report.

Creating a Quick Report

In order to simplify report creation, you can pre-populate your report directly from the table you are working from. The quick report creates a template already filled out with your Source Table and selected fields from your table in the design view. To create a quick report, do the following:

1. Open a table from your Project.

2. Using the CTRL or SHIFT keys, click on the field headers of the fields you wish to display in your report.

3. Select New > Report from the File menu or from the New icon on the toolbar.

4. A message box will appear to confirm that you wish to use the selected fields to create a new report; click Yes.

5. A new report will open in the layout view showing the selected fields. You can then either print or save your report or, if you need to make further adjustments, toggle to the design view and edit as desired.

To save the report, simple select File > Save and name your report.

Creating New Reports Based on Existing Reports

After you've developed and formatted a report, you can save that report by selecting File > Save. If you have a different table with the same file structure, you can use an existing report and just apply the new table to it. To do this, open your saved report and then open the Report Settings dialog. In the Source box, change the table to the name of the one you want to create a report with and then select the OK button. Your report will automatically update with the new data. To save this report, select File > Save As and choose a new name for your new report.

NOTE: If the file structure between your tables is different, the report will not update correctly. You either need to change the structure in the design view to match the original table or update your report with new field names, etc.