Using Summary Fields to Make a Report

[littleitaly5588]

I am trying to find information on how to build a report from Summary Fields. I am presently manually entering this information from a FM database to Excel and pulling the Excel file in as an Object. The summary fields are monthly Purchase Request totals. I prefer to do this report in FM, but keeping it in Excel is an option as long as it enters the information automatically. I've looked into ODBC, but it does not recommend using summary fields. Any advice on this is appreciated!

[Mark Appleby]

Try to create a relationship this can be a self join. If you then create sum function fields you can use them esaily in a report.

Mark

[danjacoby]

Summary fields work in Summary parts.

Sub-summary parts in FMP (which is mostly what you'd use) are only visible in Preview mode (they'll print too), and only work when the records are sorted by a user-defined field. For instance, you can sort by ClientID, or by Date -- or, in your case, a calc field that returns the month and year of the date, so you can sort by month. The Summary field would be the total of ... uh, whatever you want to total, and would go into the Sub-summary part.

The relationship idea works, but it's not so good for reports.