Modifying and Hiding Report Sections in ACT! 2007

An ACT! 2007 report template is divided into sections of information. Each section has a section title that appears in the report template but doesn't appear in the report itself. You can determine which fields you want to appear in each given section. A report template consists of five main sections; you can't delete or change the order of the sections, but you can hide a section if you don't want it to appear in your report.

The five main sections are

• Report Header: Information that appears at the top of the first page of the report, such as the report's title and creator

• Page Header: Information that appears at the top of each page, such as column headings

• Detail: Area that contains one or more of your Contact or Group fields

The Detail section is the meat and potatoes of the report — where you find pertinent information, such as the contact's name, address, and phone number.

• Page Footer: Information that appears at the bottom of each page in your report, such as the date and page number

You can resize a section to make room for additional fields by dragging the horizontal gray line (that appears at the bottom of the section) lower on the template.

After you fiddle with your report template and have it exactly the way you want it, don't forget to resize each section back to the original size — or close it up as much as possible. Any blank areas in a section appear as blank areas in your report!

Modifying report sections

Most of you will be quite happy to rely on the five default report sections. However, from time to time, you might want to get a bit fancier. Maybe you want to list each of your contacts alphabetically by last name, grouped by city. You need to create subsections within your report to accomplish this. Not a problem; here's all you need to do:

1. In the Report Designer, double-click any section header.

The Define Sections dialog box opens. Notice that in addition to adding subsections, you can choose a few other options as well:

• Page Break: Indicates whether you want to have each section appear on a new sheet of paper or start a new sheet at the end of a section

• Collapse if Blank: Closes up a section if no information is contained in it

• Allow Section to Break Across Multiple Pages: Allows a long section to continue on to multiple pages

2. Click the Add button to add a new section to the report.

The Select a Field to Group By dialog box opens.

3. Select the field that you want to use to group your report and then click OK.

4. Select an ascending order from the Define Sections dialog box.

After you select the field that you wish to group with in Step 3, you are returned to the Define Sections dialog box. The new subsection is highlighted, and you can indicate whether the new subsection appears in ascending or descending alphabetical order.

After you create a new subsection, you can place as many fields on it as you need.

Hiding a report section

There might be times when you want to hide a section. For example, say you want a report that counts the number of contacts in each of your ID/Status fields. Theoretically, ACT! needs to list all those contacts so that they can be counted, but you really don't want to see all those contacts because you're interested only in seeing a total. Although you can't remove any of the default report template sections, you can hide them, which gives you the same result.

To hide a section

1. In the Report Designer, open the Properties window by choosing View --> Properties Window.

2. Select the name of the section that you wish to hide.

3. Click the Visible property in the Properties window and then change it to No.

Although you can still see the section in the Report Designer, it doesn't appear in your finished reports.

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