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Quick Reports and Adaptive Dates

Summary: Many of you may already be familiar with the Quick Reports button on the Report windows.  For those who are not, this week’s tip will go over why this feature is helpful and how to use it.

Quick Reports allows users to save report settings to be used again later.  This is particularly helpful for reports that users run frequently or that have more specific settings.  Overdue Notices and Super Summary are just a couple of examples of this.

Another feature that has been added to make Quick Rreports even easier to use is Adaptive Dates.  See the list below for the different Adaptive Date options.  These dates allow users to add Selection criteria for a particular date range that can be saved in a Quick Report, without having to be edited.  For example, Adaptive Dates could be used to set a specific Due Date range as the Select By criteria for an Overdue report.  This setting can then be saved as a Quick Report that could be run each time that report is needed.

Adaptive Dates

%today or %td = Today’s date

%yesterday or %yd = Yesterday’s date

%tomorrow or %tm = Tomorrow’s date

%lastweek or %lw = Last Week’s date will subtract seven days from today’s date.

%nextweek or %nw = Next Week’s date will add seven days to today’s date.

%lastmonth or %lm = Last Month’s date will subtract thirty days from today’s date.

%nextmonth or %nm = Next Month’s date will add thirty days to today’s date.

%lastyear or %ly = Last Year’s date will be the same as today’s date, but with the last year.

%nextyear or %ny = Next Year’s date will be the same as today’s date, but with the next year.

You can also add or subtract a number of days from each adaptive date selection.  For example, %td –5 will subtract five days from today’s date.

Creating a Quick Report:

Select the desired report window from the Report drop-down menu.  If I was running overdue notices, I would select Circulation Reports.

Set the Report Name drop-down menu to the desired report.  For my previous example, choose Overdue Notices.

Set the Format drop-down menu as desired.

Set the Sort by drop-down menu to the desired sorting order for the report.

Check or uncheck any checkboxes that may come up based on the chosen report and the desired information to be included on that report.

Select the desired Select by criteria.  For overdue notices, you may choose to select by Date Due.  This is where you can use the Adaptive Dates to set a timeframe to be used for running the report.  An example of this would be entering a Start Date of %lastmonth and an Ending Date of %td.

Click the Create Quick Report button to save the current settings.

Give the report a name and click OK.

To run a previously created Quick Report:

Select Quick Reports from the Report drop-down menu.

Click on the report to highlight the report you want to run.

Click Print. 

You can also double click on the report to print it to screen.

Select Print from the File drop-down menu to send the report to your printer.

The Quick Report and Adaptive Date features can make running reports quick and easy.

Thank you,

The Alexandria Staff Librarians

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