Book Image

Sage ACT! 2011 Dashboard and Report Cookbook

Book Image

Sage ACT! 2011 Dashboard and Report Cookbook

Overview of this book

Sage ACT! is the top selling CRM software application, and it helps businesses to centralize contact information, organize their calendars and notes, and ultimately maximize contact relationships to optimize business efficiency and profitability. In ACT! 2011, a variety of new dashboards and reports are available for producing graphical representations of client information and for measuring the success of your sales force. This cookbook is full of practical and immediately applicable recipes that will take you from being an ACT! report and dashboard novice to a report-writing pro in no time. The recipes will show you how to create custom dashboards and reports, as well as utilize the new templates available in recent ACT! versions. You will learn to use ACT!'s Report Editor and Dashboard Designer so that you will be able to easily view important information about your business and your sales force. The recipes begin by covering the most basic elements of the ACT! reports and continue to include several recipes that will guide you through creating brand-new reports. If you have an ACT! database, you need to be able to access it quickly and logically; this book will help you do just that.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Sage ACT! 2011 Dashboard and Report Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Using the Reports view


Up until ACT! 2010/12, the only way that you could run a report was through the Report menu. However, as more reports were added to the ACT! program, no changes were made to the Reports menu. It soon became apparent that the reports area needed somewhat of a facelift and so the Reports view entered the picture. The Reports view solved a few critical reporting issues:

  • You could see a full listing of all the ACT! Reports

  • You could designate any of the reports as favorites so that you could find them again easily in the future

  • You could add a description to a report to help identify it again in the future

  • You could delete and/or edit any of the ACT! Reports

Getting ready

It's nice to keep things organized, especially when you are working with over 60 reports. By using the Reports view you will be assured that you will be able to find exactly the report you want. You can also think of the Reports view as a one-stop shop for all your Reporting needs.

The Reports view will allow you to:

  • Run reports

  • Edit reports

  • Edit report properties

  • Delete reports

  • Organize the reports into your favorites

How to do it...

  1. 1. Navigate to the ACT! Reports view using one of the following methods:

    • Click View on any of the ACT! menu bars and then choose Reports

    • Click Reports from the nav bar that runs along the left-hand side of any ACT! window

      The Reports view will appear like the one you see in the following screenshot:

    • You will notice that it is split into two windows: Favorite Reports and the Report List.

  2. 2. Select a report from the Report List by clicking on it once.

  3. 3. At this stage you can select one of the buttons on the Reports view toolbar to Run Report, Edit Report, and Delete Report for an existing report.

How it works...

The Favorite Reports area on the top of the screen shows a list of the reports that you have defined as your Favorite Reports, and the Report List on the bottom half of the screen lists every one of the ACT! Reports. As you modify one of the reports listed on the Report List, the corresponding item will update on the Favorite Reports area as well.

You will also notice that a status bar runs along the bottom of the Reports view. The status bar will give you a running total of the number of reports you have designated as Favorites as well as the total number of reports that are attached to the current database.

There's more...

We will be discussing running reports, editing their properties, and deleting reports in more detail later in this chapter.

The default order of the Report List

You will notice that the reports are listed in alphabetical order which means that the Group reports (at least those that begin with the word Group) appear together in the list, and the Opportunity reports beginning with the word Opportunity appear together.

Adding the modification date to the Report List

You can actually make one slight modification to the Report view. You'll notice the Options button that appears in the top-right corner of both the Favorite Reports and Report List areas. Give it a click and chose Customize Columns...—this happens to be your only choice. Select Last Modified from the Available fields area and then click the double-pointing right-arrows(>>) to move it to the Show as columns in this order area on the right.

Once added, you can click on the Last Modified column head to sort your reports chronologically by the date on which they were last modified so that you'll be able to easily identify any of the reports that you've created and/or modified.

Just in case you are chomping at the bit to start editing a report or two, you can read the next few chapters in this book where we'll show you how to do just that.