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

Introduction


In this chapter, we will be working with the ACT! report editor. We won't be covering the running of the reports here other than for testing purposes. We will 'go under the hood' to look at how to create and customize report templates and good practices for creating the report templates. The converting of custom report templates from the ACT! 3-6 versions of the ACT! program is included.

Newcomers to a reporting tool such as the ACT! Reports often try to view the report template as being similar to a word processing document. Reports are very different from word processing documents. With a word processing document you are working directly with the final output or with a master document that can be edited before printing. With report editors such as the ACT! Reports, you are actually writing a program (called a report template), the purpose of which is to extract specific data from a database and format the data for display or printing. The report template can also include...