Family Historian User Group

Does anyone know a way of 'formatting', (that's what I know it as anyway!), a page for a query report - ie centering it, adjusting the margins, indents etc., like you can with a normal report?

I know you can alter the fonts using 'Query Options' but how do you adjust everything else? Is this one for the wish list or just me getting tired?

Mike

ID:423

I don't think you can at the moment. I will see if Calico come back to you on the post on the Mailing List, if not I will add it to the wish list.

Obviously as a work around you can cut and paste the data in to a spread sheet and format there.

On the Mailing List Simon Orde replied

Mike

You can adjust the width of each column by clicking, and dragging sideways, on the intersection between the column heading buttons. This not only adjusts the width on screen, but adjusts the printed output column width too. You can check what it will look like when printed by using 'Print Preview'. However, there is currently no way of formatting a query report in the way that you describe (margins, indents, etc); so that is one for the Wish List.

One good solution if you have a spreadsheet application though is to use your spreadsheet application to print off query reports. There are 2 ways of getting the data into a spreadsheet. You can either click on the 'Save Results to File' button, and save the results to a text file (the default options - colum headings and tab-separated columns - works well with Excel. You can just open them more or less like any other spreadsheet file (you may have to change the file type in the Open dialog appropriately, in order to be able to see the file to select it). Alternatively you can simply copy and paste the whole thing into an open spreadsheet. To select all the cells in the F.H. results tab of the Query Window, click on the cell in the top left corner. Then scroll down to the bottom and holding the shift key pressed, click on the cell in the bottom right corner. That will select the whole thing. Then click on the 'Copy Selected Cells' button (or press Ctrl-C) to copy.

Spreadsheets like Excel will not only give you plenty of choices for formatting the output nicely when you print it, but will also let you produce all kinds of charts analysing your data too - which might be of interest if the data you are looking at is in any way statistical.

If you don't have a spreadsheet program, you can fake a margin on the left-side, within Family Historian, by simply adding a blank column. Family Historian won't let you have no expression for a column, but if you add an expression like 'INDI.NAME[10]' (the 10th name for an Individual), its going to be blank - assuming you don't have any records which contain 10 names or more for the same person. The column heading can be blank. The right margin width can effectively be controlled by controlling the width of columns in the report itself.

Incidentally I can see the desirability of being able to configure margins, but I wasn't sure what you had in mind by 'indents'. How would you want to use indents in a query report?

Simon Orde List Administrator & Family Historian designer

PS I should have mentioned that you can only add columns to custom queries. So if the query you want to print is a standard query, you would have to first save it as a custom query.