Printing and Reporting
Printing and reporting provide hard copy access to contacts, deals, and appointments.
Scope: One, Selected, Visible, Or All
Often you just want information printed for a deal or contact. Other times you might want to print a call list of your most recent contacts or a list of your highest rated deals. You might need a complete printout of all your appointments. In each of these situations, the scope varies - a single item, a selected list of items, or all items.
By the way, "visible" means "listed, not hidden" rather than just off-the-screen. Show and Hide buttons allow deals and and contacts to be present in your pipeline but temporarily suppressed. This handy technique allows the Deal and Contact lists to be quickly configured as ad-hoc lists for reporting and calling.
Printing A Deal, Contact Or Appointment
The Contact, Deal, and Appointment form's Print button creates a report with a scope of just one contact, deal, or appointment, and uses the default Print Contact or Print Deal or Print Appointment report.
You can also print a deal or contact by selecting it in the Deals list or Contacts list and pressing the Print button.
Printing Several Deals or Contacts
The Print buttons on the Deals list or Contacts list will create a report with the scope of:
- The selected item or items
- If no items are selected, then all the items visible in the list
This offers a range of options for printing. For example:
- Select a single deal and press Print.
- Select a group of contacts and press print.
- Use the more sophisticated capabilities of Show and Hide in the Contact list to hide some contacts and show others. Then, with none selected, press Print. The scope is all visible contacts in the list.
Reports with ALL your contacts, or ALL your deals, or ALL your appointments
Choosing a report through the File / Backstage ==> Reports menu will produce reports that contain ALL your pipelines contacts or deals, or ALL your appointments.
If all of the contacts are visible in the Contacts tab and none are selected, then pressing Print will produce a report with ALL your contacts. The same is true in the Deals tab.
Switching Reports & Scope
The report form remembers it's scope. So for example if you started a report by selecting 10 contacts in the Contact list and pressing Print then your report form has a scope of those 10 contacts. Within the report form you can switch to other other reports without closing the form. This means you could print the all the details of the 10 contacts via the Print Contact report, then switch to the Phone Directory report and print a call list for those same 10 contacts. Note: if you switch to a non-contact report - like the Deal List report - this example scope of 10 contacts does not apply to deals, so the Deal List report shows ALL deals.
Report Actions - Importing And Deleting Reports
The Backstage Reports tab has an Actions area that allows reports to be imported or deleted.
As a practical matter, report files are stored in your My Documents\Software On Sailboats\Reports directory. The files are specially named to identify the reports as contact, deal, calendar, tasks, or business reports.
Importing copies a correctly named file into the reports directory and Deleting removes one or more of them. Deleted reports can be recovered through your system's Recycle capability.
Viewing, Changing, Cut/Copying and Highlighting Your Report
Once selected, your report will be displayed and can be printed. Before printing you may want to
- Do some minor markup - highlight, underline, bold, strikeout, etc.
- Edit content of the report - add or delete text or sections
- Cut/Copy/Paste the report content - for example to paste it into an email
- Search for a word or phrase
Printing and Print Setup
The File tab / Backstage area offers a Print button, and also the print Setup button.
Exporting Your Report
Besides using cut/copy to move your report content into programs like Word or Outlook, you can also export your report contents into an html file or text file.