My end goal is to list monthly totals. fm.5 has an example supplied called sales report. I duplicated it's example for "by Date" and eliminated everything but the subsummary part, and colored it. It is sorted by "Week Number". Checking preview showes the color, and adding fields works as expected. However I can't manage to reporduce the same on my file. I even tried re-creating, (in the example), the same calculation field, same type and options =WeekofYear(Date Sold), but changed the name to "Week nu". After redefining the paret to the new "Week Nu", it will not display in preview, and I can't see any difference. I can't get any subsummary to show in preview, what am I missing? thank you

Based on the date of each record, create calc fields for Year = Year(Date) and Month = Month(Date). Have a Summary field which = Total of Cost

Sort your records by Year, then Month, Then Date.

Create a layout with the following parts

Sub-Summary when sorted by year (contains Year field and Summary field of cost)

Sub-Summary when sorted by month (contains Date formatted to sjow full month name and Summary of cost)

Body (contains Item, date and cost)

You can delete the body patr if you don't want the report to show every cost item.

Assuming you delete the body part, now go to preview mode and you should see something like

2002

November 128

December 213

2003

January 561

February 126

etc

The reason you should sort by year first is otherwise you will get January 2002 and January 2003 figures added together. If this is actually what you want, then change the sort and remove the Year sub-summary part.