Report Formatting

Contains tips for configurators working with Aware IM
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PointsWell
Posts: 1457
Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2017 5:51 am
Location: 'Stralya

Report Formatting

Post by PointsWell »

Ever wonder why your reports are a major pain to get things to line up?

The report writer is lying to you, that's the problem.

The UI is incorrectly showing you space you don't have.

If you've got an A4 portrait page then you have a report size like this:
Page Sizes
Page Sizes
Screenshot 2022-12-07 at 16.26.57.png (29.36 KiB) Viewed 17446 times
And when you look at the report writer you'll get a WYSIWYG layout like this:
Report Ruler
Report Ruler
Screenshot 2022-12-07 at 16.26.42.png (12.44 KiB) Viewed 17446 times
So going back to the report sizes, you have a page width of 595 points and when you look at the ruler, the ruler goes all the way to 595. That's your page.

WRONG!

The left hand margin measures from zero. That is zero of your workable space. If you go back and look at the margins of the page, the left margin is set to 30 points. So what the ruler shows as zero is actually the start of the page from the left hand margin (i.e. left page edge plus 30).

So far so obvious. Look back at the right end of the screen ruler. It shows the page as ending at 595 points. WRONG. The page edge is actually only 565, because 30 points were sacrificed to the left margin. But again if you work in your margin for the right hand side of the page you have to sacrifice 30 points. Which means that in order to respect left and right margin you need to chop 60 points off the ruler - your workable page is 535, 595-(30+30).

If you then start adding in sub reports and not realising that you don't actually have what the screen shows you available to play with you then find that your reports start falling off the right end of the page.

I have spent almost a week trying to figure out why this was going so wrong in my reports.
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