Overview

FastClose is capable of creating reports that appear precisely as the user wishes to see them in their Management Report Pack

This formatting can be configured in the Designer and seen in the Reader and can be exported, or run directly in Excel with the same look and feel.

Here is a video, or read below.

To do this, requires the use of FastClose’s formatting system.

Formatting Toolbar

To configure formatting switch to the “Formatting” tab…

The main formatting button (highlighted above) takes the user to the formatting dialog, whilst the two buttons to the right are shortcuts that take the user straight to the default Value Columns or default Label Columns formats in that dialog.

The Apply Style control, configures formatting according to a set of predefined styles that allow the user to quickly achieve certain feels without having to go into the formatting dialog at all. Styles include:

• “Paper” (replaces all the greys with white and gets rid of grid lines)

• “Accounting” (automatically format numbers to 0 decimal places with negatives in red and parentheses).

as well as others aimed at easy reading of more transactional data.

Finally, there is a checkbox to automatically hide calculated results that are a % of a %. They rarely make sense.

Formatting Dialog

Default Formats

Opening the formatting dialog, and selecting the Default Formats tab, shows the four formatting defaults:

The Label Columns, Value Columns and Column Headers defaults affect different zones of the reporting space as shown below:

Then, the fourth default format, the All Columns default, covers the combined Label and Value zones though not the column header zone.

Each of these default formats can specify:

• The font - style, size, colour

• The fill - the colour to appear in the background

• Borders - left, right, top, bottom etc… colour and thickness of each

• Alignment - horizontal and vertical alignment of the text

• Display Format - applied to numeric data (eg: decimal places, display as % etc)

• Column width (does not apply to the column header format) – “Auto” or a specified number of pixels.

In addition, the Value Columns default also supports the option of overriding elements of the format according to user defined conditions via the Conditions button in the bottom right corner. This is used to format -ve numbers in red for example. As an advanced topic this is covered in the “Advanced Formatting” tutorial.

Column Formats

The Column Formats tab lists any specific column formats defined and allows the creation of new ones.

Tip:- For reports where the selected month or year changes with the month, it is recommended that you convert these to use variables before defining column formatting. This allows the formatting to reference the variable rather than the underlying month and year and thus preserves formatting as time rolls forward.

Formats for both Column Header Formats and Column Formats are listed on this tab and are applied to the grid as shown below.

A Column Format can be created either by clicking “Add Column Format” highlighted in blue above or by right clicking on the column of interest and selecting “Format Column” as shown below:

Column Formats have the same formatting elements as the Default formats (ie: font, fill, borders, alignment, display format and width) and take precedence over styling set in the defaults. Each element includes an Inherit setting so that where a column format doesn’t give a setting for an element, the one from the underlying default will still come through.

For example the default format could specify the font and the number display format for the whole grid, whilst the column format could specify that the font should be bold and on a grey background and FastClose will combine the two.

A Column Header Format can be created by clicking “Add Column Header Format” in the formatting dialog or by right clicking on the column of interest and selecting “Set Column Caption” as shown below and then clicking the format button in the Caption dialog:

The remaining two tabs in the formatting dialog (Row Formats and Cell Formats) are advanced topics and are discussed in the Advanced Formatting tutorial.

Subtotal and Hierarchy Formats

As well as formatting the default areas and providing column overrides, FastClose can also format specific rows of the report. Because this depends on whether the report involves subtotalling or hierarchies, this formatting is not handled in the Formatting dialog, but instead in those respective dialogs.

Subtotal Formatting

The format buttons in the Total & Subtotal dialog shown below, allow the user to configure specific formats for specific subtotal and total lines. They might use successively larger font sizes, varying colours, or the use of borders to add emphasis to the subtotalling.

Similar formatting can also be applied to Column Totals and Subtotals.

Hierarchy Formatting

As well as formatting the default areas and providing column overrides, it is also possible to format specific rows in hierarchies.

Every row in a hierarchy can be formatted with its own formatting style by clicking on the palette symbol (as shown to the right hand side of each item). The same formatting elements can be defined as with the Default and Column formats (ie: font, fill, borders, alignment and display format whilst column width is replaced by row height) and again FastClose will combine formats that overlap or cross each other appropriately.

In the example above, Gross Profit Percent is set to be highlighted in bold.

Where the hierarchy has a regular structure, it can alternatively be formatted by depth using the Level Formats feature in the top right of the dialog.

Advanced Formatting

See the Advanced Formatting Tutorial (tbw) for details on how to create conditional formatting (including -ve’s in red) and cell based formatting.

Exercises and Tutorial Survey

04.02 Formatting - Exercises.pdf

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