Report Customization Tips and Tricks

By David H. Ringstrom, CPA

Depending on the version you choose, Office Accounting offers 20 to 70-plus standard reports. Even this dizzying assortment might not meet your exact needs, but it’s easy to customize every report to your liking.

Professional recommended:Office Accounting Express or Standard users can make most of these report customizations, but will be unable to save their work, while Office Accounting Professional users can save customized reports for future use. Express or Standard users should consider the free sixty-day trial of Office Accounting Professional.

Add a Chart

Certain reports offer the ability to add a bar chart, as shown in Figure 1:

Figure 1: You can add a bar chart to certain Office Accounting reports.

1. Choose Reports, and then Reports Home (or press Ctrl-7).
2. Choose Balance Sheet from the Select a Report list, and then click Display.
3. Choose View, and then Show Chart (or click the Chart icon on the report toolbar).

Limitations: The bar chart only appears on screen or on printed copies of your reports. The chart is omitted when you e-mail or send the report to Excel. Also, you cannot modify the chart itself, so pie charts or other formats are not available within Office Accounting. The Chart icon on the report toolbar is disabled when a report doesn’t offer chart capabilities.

Fit More on a Page

You can customize the paper size, orientation and margins for every report within Office Accounting:

1. Display any report on the screen.
2. Choose File, and then Page Setup, and then change settings as needed:

·Paper size: If supported by your printer, consider using legal paper to print particularly long — or wide — reports.

·Orientation: Change the orientation to landscape from portrait if you need to fit more columns on a page.

·Margins: Changing the margins also enables you to fit more on a page. Most laser printers can print to within .25 inches of the page, while some ink jet printers may need .5 inches.

3. If you still need more room on the page, consider shrinking some of the column widths. As you can see in Figure 2, a | symbol separates each report field. Grab the | separator while holding down your left mouse button, and then drag the column to the left to reduce it, or to the right to increase it. A dotted line appears on screen to indicate what the width of the column will be when you release your mouse.

Figure 2: Resize report columns to fit more information on a page.

More flexibility: You can click the Excel button, or choose Actions, and then Send to Excel, to gain even more control over the format of your report.

Control Content

Just about every Office Accounting report allows you to tweak the report criteria. For instance, list reports such as Vendor allow you show active, inactive, or all vendors. Transaction and financial reports allow you to specify certain accounts or groups of accounts. As an example, let’s create a report that displays all customer transactions greater than $10,000:

1. Choose Reports, Customers and Receivables, and then Customer Transaction History.
2. Click the Filter Options button on the toolbar (or press Ctrl-F).
3. As shown in Figure 3, click Amount, Greater Than, and then $10,000.

Figure 3: Some reports can be filtered by an amount threshold.

4. Click OK to view the resulting report.

Different types of reports offer different filtering options, so be sure to explore this important capability.

Manage Headers and Footers

Every report in Office Accounting allows you to add a subtitle, notes, and footer, as well as to customize or even hide certain headings:

1. Display a report on screen in Office Accounting.
2. Click the Modify Report button on the toolbar (or press Ctrl-M).
3. Click Header and Footer in the Modify Report pane that appears on the right.
4. Deselect (or modify if permitted) any of these default choices:

·Company Name: This choice prints your company’s name at the top of the report. It defaults to the name that you listed in the Company Name field that you can access by choosing Company, and then Company Information. However, you can also modify the company name that appears on a particular report.

·Report Title: This choice displays the default report name, such as Balance Sheet, but you can override the default report name if you wish.

·Filter Text: Filter Text provides a brief description of the choices that you made in the Filters choice of the Modify Report button. You cannot modify the text of this field, but you can choose to omit it from the report.

·Date Range: This field reflects the date or date range that the report represents. You change the date range at the top of some reports, or follow these steps:

1. Click the Filters button in the Modify Report pane.

2. Click View Filter Options (beneath Applied Filter).

3. Choose Date Range from the Select Filter Options window, and then set the date range.

You cannot modify the format of the Date Range field other than to have it not appear on your report.

·Date Created: This field prints today’s date in the following format:

Day of Week, Month Day, Year, e.g. Tuesday, February 20, 2008

As with the Date Range field, you cannot modify the format other than to omit it from your report.

Add or Remove Columns

Some reports allow you to add or remove columns:

1. Choose Reports, Vendors and Payables, and then Vendor List.
2. Click the Modify Report button on the toolbar (or press Ctrl-M).
3. Click Columns in the Modify Report pane that appears on the right.
4. As shown in Figure 4, you can add or remove certain columns from the report.

Figure 4: Some reports enable you to add or remove columns.

Conversely, financial reports only allow you to manage the amount columns:

1. Choose Reports, Company and Financial, and then Profit and Loss.
2. Click the Modify Report button on the toolbar (or press Ctrl-M).
3. Click Columns in the Modify Report pane that appears on the right.
4. As shown in Figure 5, you can choose a different format for the amount column, and add comparative columns if you wish.

Figure 5: Financial reports offer different capabilities than list or transaction reports.

The aging reports offer yet another type of customization:

1. Choose Reports, Customers and Receivables, and then A/R Aging Detail.
2. As shown in Figure 6, you can modify the aging interval and through number of days. For instance, you could age receivables (or payables) on a 15 or 45 day basis, perhaps if your industry doesn’t follow standard 30 day terms.

Figure 6: You can override the default 30-day increments that appear on Office Accountings aging reports.

Manage Saved Reports

Once you’ve arranged the report to your liking, Office Accounting Professional users can choose File, and then Save As. Assign a name to your report, and then click OK. Going forward, you can choose your customized Report from the Saved Reports section of the Reports menu or the Saved Reports section of the Reports Home. You’ll also use the Reports Home when you want to delete a saved report:

1. Choose Reports, and then Reports Home (or press Ctrl-7).
2. As shown in Figure 7, choose Saved Reports from the Navigation Pane along the left-hand side of the screen.

Figure 7: The Saved Reports choice on the Navigation pane lets you select and delete a saved report.

3. Click once on your saved report name in the Select a Report list.
4. Choose Edit, and then Delete (or press Ctrl-D).
5. Click Yes to confirm that you wish to delete the report.

As you’re probably aware, you cannot delete any of the built-in reports in Office Accounting. Also, keep in mind that you may inadvertently duplicate a saved report. Let’s say that you have a saved report named Custom A/R Aging. If you modify the Custom A/R Aging report and then choose Save As and accept the default name, Office Accounting will create a second report called Custom A/R Aging1. Therefore, be sure to use Save instead of Save As if you’re making changes to an existing saved report.

E-mail a Report

You can click the e-mail button, or choose Actions and then E-mail Report, to send an Office Accounting report to others. Keep in mind that the resulting report is an Excel spreadsheet, so the recipient will either need to have Microsoft Excel installed on their computer or the free Excel 2003 viewer. As of this writing an Excel 2007 viewer is not yet available, but the free Office 2007 Compatibility Pack enables Excel Viewer users to open Excel 2007 files, too. Office Accounting reports are generated in the Excel 97-2003 format, so installing the compatibility pack is optional.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Microsoft.