Donor Level Report in crystal

Jeannine Lozier

Hi My office is in the process of creating a real time digital donor recognition wall. I need a more expansive Donor level/category report then is built into RE to act as our "double check" that all information on screen is correct. The report must include specified addresses without cutting off name, listing of all tributes for the year, head of house hold indication, deceased indication and inactive indication). Any advice, guidelines or pitt falls to avoid please share. I've created some simple reports but this is making me nervous. Regards, J

James Andrews

Jeannine Lozier:
Hi My office is in the process of creating a real time digital donor recognition wall. I need a more expansive Donor level/category report then is built into RE to act as our "double check" that all information on screen is correct. The report must include specified addresses without cutting off name, listing of all tributes for the year, head of house hold indication, deceased indication and inactive indication). Any advice, guidelines or pitt falls to avoid please share. I've created some simple reports but this is making me nervous. Regards, J

Advice: Subreports are your friend. For instance, make the address a subreport. Use a separate section for each line, and suppress blank sections for all of them. That way you won't end up like this:

Joe Schmoe

1234 Any St

Wherever, PA

Helen Wieger

Jeannine Lozier:
Hi My office is in the process of creating a real time digital donor recognition wall. I need a more expansive Donor level/category report then is built into RE to act as our "double check" that all information on screen is correct. The report must include specified addresses without cutting off name, listing of all tributes for the year, head of house hold indication, deceased indication and inactive indication). Any advice, guidelines or pitt falls to avoid please share. I've created some simple reports but this is making me nervous. Regards, J

Pitt falls to avoid: Be sure to check how your tables are linked (Left Outer Join usually works best for my reports) and how formulas are handling null values. I've had many a headache with forgetting to change "Ignore null values" to "Use Default Value for Null Values" (if you ignore null values you may end up dropping everyone from the report who doesn't have a city, or a middle name, or some other field).

Also, if you want to group the report by total amount of gifts (eg. $5000-$20000 in one group), you'll need to base that on a gift summary field from RE, not on a sum calculated in Crystal (Crystal cannot group based on a total of the potential group).

Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE

James Andrews:
Advice: Subreports are your friend. For instance, make the address a subreport. Use a separate section for each line, and suppress blank sections for all of them. That way you won't end up like this:

Joe Schmoe

1234 Any St

Wherever, PA

Yeah!  What James said.  [8-|]  Sounds like sub-reports will be your best friend very soon.