FirePoint's Field Reporter works from all FirePoint applications. The Field Reporter totals the number of occurrences of a value in an alpha field. It displays these totals as a table and optionally in a graphic. Let's create a field report from the Apparatus application as an example.
At the Command Window press the Apparatus button. Press Show All to show all Apparatus records. Under the File menu select Print Report. Press the Field Report button and the Create button as illustrated below.
Fill-in the required information on the report form as illustrated below. This will be a very simple report.
1. Choose a Chart Function. You can choose to track the number of times an item appears (count), the average of a numeric field or the total of a numeric field. Choose Count for our example.
2. Enter a title to appear on your report.
3. Select a field on the left. Click once on the field you wish to select. Press the Select button. Most fields don't have related description fields but some coded fields do. (For example, an ActionCode2 field may have a related ActionDesc2 field which provides a description for the code. If you select a coded set of fields make sure you select the code field for the first field and the description field for the second field.)
4. Select a chart type for your report.
5. Charts cannot have an unlimited number of legends. For example, if you choose a pie chart you may wish to limit its legends (number of slices of the pie) to 12 or so. If there are more than 12 choices, for example, FirePoint will group all of the least significant legend totals into the 12th legend titled "Other". This greatly enhances the appearance of your report.
Press Print. You may now edit your chart. Not you can choose from Default or Custom Styles, you may experiment with chart types, you can reduce the number of legends if you wish. Because our example is a bar chart we can adjust the scale by providing minimum and maximum values as well as defining the increment used in the display. Here the "Increment" was reset to the number "1" to avoid fractional horizontal lines on our chart.
If we were editing a pie chart we could "explode" a slice or two for emphasis. Buttons to select a pie chart segment and to "Explode" the segment appear when a Pie Chart is chosen from the chart type drop-down list.
Press the Print button to print the report you have created. Notice the final report totals the values you've selected and presents this information in chart form.
Field reporting is a very powerful feature that makes it possible to create graphs and charts from nearly any plausible field combination within FirePoint. FirePoint field reporting formats may be created, stored and run whenever you wish. More on that later in this chapter.