Sage ACT! 2011 Dashboard and Report Cookbook

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.

Sage ACT! 2011 Dashboard and Report Cookbook

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Exploring the ACT! Reports

Introduction

Using the ACT! Reports menu

Using the Reports view

Running a report from the Report view

Choosing a Report Output Option

Editing Reports in the Reports view

Keeping a list of Favorite reports

Finding the default location of the ACT! Reports

Filtering Data in Reports

Introduction

Filtering based on a contact field lookup

Filtering Contact reports

Filtering based on a contact activity lookup

Filtering Notes and History in reports

Filtering activities in reports

Filtering Groups reports

Filtering Company reports

Filtering Opportunity reports

Presetting filters for most used option

Creating a Quick Report

Introduction

Setting preferences for the quick reports

Selecting and organizing the columns for a contact list quick report

Printing the contact list quick report

Printing the History tab quick report

Printing the contact detail view quick report

Exporting the Opportunities List View to Excel

Working with the Report Editor

Introduction

Converting ACT! 6 custom reports

Choosing a template type and setting defaults

Adding fields to template and basic formatting

Naming field objects and individual field formatting

Positioning fields and labels

Adding a custom field and creating a basic script

Adding sections for sorting and grouping

Using sections for sub-totaling and totaling

Subreports and Scripting Techniques

Introduction

Formatting a List Type report

Adding subreports to a report

Adding fields to the secondary contacts subreport

Adding fields to the history subreport

Scripting basics by example

Reverse engineering a set of complex scripts

Labels and Envelopes

Introduction

Editing a standard envelope

Adding a logo to an envelope

Creating a custom envelope

Creating an xx64 label template

Working with the ACT! Dashboards

Introduction

Getting familiar with the Dashboard layouts

Accessing information from Dashboards

Copying Dashboard information to other products

Printing Dashboards

Making Dashboards the default startup preference

Filtering Dashboards

Introduction

Filtering the Contacts Dashboards

Filtering the Activity Dashboards

Filtering the Opportunity Dashboards

Filtering the Admin Dashboard

Changing the Dashboard Data

Editing Existing Dashboards

Introduction

Cloning an existing Dashboard

Changing the Dashboard display type

Changing the Dashboard default filters

Changing the Dashboard headers and footers

Changing the Dashboard legends

Changing the Dashboard totals

Changing the Dashboard scales and limits

Setting a Dashboard target

Modifying the closed sales to date component

Changing the Dashboard data charts

Working with the Dashboard Designer

Introduction

Creating a new Dashboard

Adding or removing columns and rows

Creating wider components

Adding components to the Dashboard

Adding data charts to the Dashboard

Changing the order of the Dashboard components

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Naming field objects and individual field formatting

If you have past experience with visual programming editors such as Visual Basic, the tools in the ACT! report editor should be somewhat familiar. As with visual programming editors, everything in the ACT! report template has an object name. When you insert a field or field label, the report editor assigns a default name to the element that is called the object name. In most cases, the default name is fine. However, as the template becomes more complex, the default field names become inadequate. This happens because the default field names are based on the database field name. As the list of objects becomes longer, it can be difficult to find specific fields. In the previous task, we did most of the field formatting but now we need to do some specific field formatting.

Getting ready

If you are doing this task immediately after finishing the previous task, you should still have the Report Training template open for editing. If so, skip...

Sage ACT! 2011 Dashboard and Report Cookbook

Sage ACT! 2011 Dashboard and Report Cookbook

Overview of this book

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Sage ACT! 2011 Dashboard and Report Cookbook

Naming field objects and individual field formatting

Getting ready