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animattor · GoldMine Apprentice

I am modifying a stock GM report--Contact Profile (Detailed)-- and I would like to change the sort order of the history activities. The default is to list from oldest entry -->newest entry (which is not very useful!). Is it possible to reverse this order?

I searched the forum, and found a similar question asked on the GMv6 forum, and the answer was "Nope. Can't be done." I am (faintly) hoping that it has been improved since then.

Thanks!

DJ · GoldMine Guru

Caveat: Only modify a Clone of the Report.

I don't think that it is possible to reverse the Sort Order.

animattor · GoldMine Apprentice

SIGH

It is as I feared...doomed.
(and yes, the report was cloned) I was able to modfiy some fields to our liking, but the sort order is annoying. oh well.

Maybe I'll have to try installing crystal. I've heard it's hard to set up but makes good reports. We do have mastermine also, but it's not goog for this kind of data.

thanks again, DJ.

DougCastell · GoldMine Guru

Have you got Corporate or Premium Edition of GoldMine? If so, they come with the 'Answer Wizard' which has a whole set of canned reports that, to an extent, mimic the canned GoldMine reports. Maybe one of them will be helpful here? Regardless, it's an under-rated and under-used module of GoldMine, in my opinion.

Beyond that, yes, a Crystal report would be able to accomplish this.

animattor · GoldMine Apprentice

Thanks for pointing that out, Doug.

I'm having a hard time installing it...the help files are a bit vague regarding setting up the "data sources" it wants. I think I'll try FR Support and see if I can get them to help me set it up, since they're eating my support dollars already.

DougCastell · GoldMine Guru

ABSOLUTELY. Make them earn that maintenance money!

DJ · GoldMine Guru

It's my understanding that FR will not support Crystal or SQL Server, Iain WIcks, on the other hand, created some excellent Training CD's, and the Administrator CD taught me how to use Crystal Reports with GoldMine.

bgannett · GoldMine Guru

I agree with DJ in that Iain Wicks has some excellent training materials. Like DJ, I too have learned a lot from Iain's CD's.

Another way to solve this problem may be to use a SQL Query to capture the data and output it to Excel. I have used SQL queries for sever History reports. It is easy to sort on a field in SQL Queries and/or on the resulting Excel spreadsheet.

DJ · GoldMine Guru

True, but reports permit immediate presentation quality results.

bgannett · GoldMine Guru

Agreed but an accurate Excel spreadsheet satisfies for many requirements.

animattor · GoldMine Apprentice

We have mastermine which is great for excel-type data (statistics kind of things) but in this case we are doing contact reports so I need the layout of a report for each record. I am going to get with FRS today and see if they'll help me get Answer Wizard working. if that works i may not need to worry about crystal at this point.

S_F · Experienced Miner

DougCastell · GoldMine Guru

personally, I tend to use native SQL data sources as opposed to ODBC. Makes things easier to admin...

animattor · GoldMine Apprentice

Thanks for all the suggestions so far.

I did get FRS to help me install Answer Wizard, and it now works <almost> problem free. But it's reports are about the same as GM reports, so I don't really gain anything by using them (at least for the report I'm looking for).

I followed Sebastian's suggestion and installed Crystal, and almost immediately, everything i've ever heard about Crystal was confirmed: it is powerful, flexible, and complicated!

doug: I am running SQL 2005 for GM, but odbc seems to be the only option to connect Crystal to it (that I'm aware of anyway).

DJ · GoldMine Guru

ODBC is the most reliable connection string for Crystal Reports.