Overview

As a part of the process of creating paper-like management reports, it is useful to be able to take control of the labels applied to column headings, remove clutter and drive them dynamically.

Here is a video, or read below.

Setting Column Headings

To configure column headings, switch to the “Layout” tab and select Rows / Columns…

… and switch to the second tab of the Rows / Columns dialog.

This displays the column heading for every column in the report along with a … button that takes the user to the individual “Set Column Caption” dialog shown below.

This can also be reached without going into the Rows / Columns dialog by right clicking on a column header in the grid and selecting “Set Column Caption” as below:

The columns captions dialog, is very similar to the report title dialog from section 04.03

The dialog contains:

a caption expression area that the user can type into
a preview zone showing how it will look in the report
an area at the bottom containing dynamic elements that can be added to the expression
and some predefined samples for inspiration.

At its simplest the user can simply type the caption they want to see into the expression and that is what they will get.

Eg:- Actual for September 2011

But where a report is likely to be re-used year on year or some other selections in the across axis could change from time to time, the option to build something a bit more dynamic, is powerful.

Syntax

The dialog is very much designed to be point and click but those clicking actions do generate an expression which has a syntax which is useful to understand. The syntax itself is similar to that used by the Report Titles system, though the list of available parameters is much reduced.

As with report titles, anything inside curly braces is a parameter and anything outside is literal text.

Eg:- {Caption([Year].[CurrentYear])}, Period 9, Actual

Might produce “2011, Period 9, Actual”

Parameters

Items in this Column Group

At the time of writing, the Items in this Column group is the only group provided.

It contains one entry for each field item that makes up the columns and they are presented in the order that the fields are organised in the across axis.

There are a variety of ways in which a user might want to see information about such an item, so each provides a drop-down list of the various options along with the text (shown in italics) that the option will currently produce.

For example, the user may just want to display the caption of the item:

Eg:- Month: {Caption(ColumnItem([Period]))}

which would produce “Month: Period 9”.

Column Header Formatting

Column Captions and the cell header they are displayed on can be formatted using the palette button to the right of the preview area as shown above. Options cover all the usual formatting features ie: font, fill, alignment and borders.