* Writing Custom Reports

[INF]

Apologies if this has come up before but being new to FHUG and having looked right through the forums, knowledge base and online help I can't find any indication of how to write a custom report. I can see where existing reports can be modified in terms of content and font etc., but not where more radical changes can be effected. Presently the only Report I want to use is the Individual Summary Report. In particular I want to have line spaces between each Event and for the photos associated with each event to appear with it. Since FH advertises that writing custom reports is a feature of the software I assume that what I want to do is possible but that I'm overlooking the instructions for doing it?
Any advice appreciated! Thanks.
Ian

ID:6519

[tatewise]

What FH actually advertises is:

Comes with 31 highly configurable reports and you can create your own custom reports using standard reports as templates.

By this it means that you can customise, within certain parameters, the standard reports, but it does not include a configurable Report Writer.
Beyond that, you can export a customised report in a word-processor (RTF) or other format, and post edit them manually.

Unfortunately, although some Options > Format tab settings allow heading spacing to be altered, the spacing of Events cannot.

The Options > Pictures tab settings allow Max.Pics to be increased to ensure all photos are included.
However, they are added to the Main section at the top, and not each associated Event.

[INF]

That's really disappointing to hear in an otherwise superb piece of software. You are quite right to point out what the advertised features actually say, but reading them initially had made me assume (obviously wrongly) that an existing report could be customised in the same sort of way that, say, an MS Access database report can be customised - i.e. to make it do what you need as opposed to making modifications to the output appearance. I can see from looking at the wishlist that nobody else feels this way so, repeating my first observation that I think the program is brilliant, I'll just say thanks for such a quick response; at least it saved me searching further!

[tatewise]

I agree that much of what FH does, is indeed brilliant.
Also, to be fair, FH does allow somewhat more than just the 'appearance' of reports to be customised.

I believe other FH users export the GEDCOM file to 'other software' in order to use its reporting features, and they may offer you advice here.

Also FH does offer the Custom Query feature that can produce tabulated or CSV reports, which with a Mail Merge could produce stylised reports, but admittedly not quite what you were expecting.

[Jane]

Of course you could also write a plugin if you wanted, to interact with MS Word using OLE to build the exact report you wanted, or if it's simply a layout issue save your report as a RTF file and change the layout in Word manually or with a VBA script.

[INF]

Thank you both for your responses. I realise that exporting to Word and modifying things there is probably the only option, and is easy. The problem, as with any database, is that things don't 'stand still' and once you add to or amend the source data you then have to make changes in the program you've output to. Sounds minor but it's error-prone and an irritant better avoided. Still, not worth losing sleep over so I'll stop banging on about it.