Report with grouped data by month

[White Lotus]

I'm new here, a fundraiser for a school for Tibetan Buddhist kids in northern India. I wouldn't call myself a developer but Filemaker Tech Support says what I have is a script problem and referred me to these pages. I'm running FP 5.5 on Mac OSX, both of which are quite new to me. (Used to 5.0 on OS9.)

I have one database with donor records, and another linked database with donations. I want the latter to print me out lists of donations for each month. I created a "month" field in this database, which calculates itself from the date and seems to work fine in the data entry layout.

I then use the "New Layout/Report" helper to create a layout and script to report with grouped data under Month - sorted by month and then date. Every time I've tried this, it glitches. Puts 90% of the records under December and the rest under January - though it calls the subtotal November(!)

It seems a very basic function - I can't be the first person to want reports by month? Am I doing something mind-blowingly obviously wrong?

[Vaughan]

What? FM Inc sent you here? Quick LiveOak, send FMI an invoice!!!

Are you sorting it correctly before previewing the layout?

[Kurt Knippel]

You have obviously done something wrong. However you are telling us that you are lost, and asking us which turn you missed. However we do not know where you started or where you went or where you ended up.

I would suggest starting over and making sure that you actually set everything up in the way that you think it should be. It is quite possible that you just missed something. All of us have this happen from time to time.

Make 100% sure that the month field is actually calculating correctly, and that you are not simply looking at a formatted field for you date.

[White Lotus]

Thanks for the advice, chaps. Filemaker Support in UK did indeed send me here, they said: "that's a script problem, which is a developer issue; we don't support developer issues since you only have the Educational version, so go to that website". Which sounded like a "go away, we can't be bothered" to me, but then I'm no expert.

I eventually got around the problem by specifying two fields, one a month number, the other a name, both calculated from date. Sorted it by month number, then pasted the month name into the layout.

Mind you, it's still acting buggy in the columnar report format. About 10% of records leave a blank in one field (the donor name, looked up from the related file) although that info is there on the data entry screen. I have to scroll through the whole report in Browse mode, then manually copy and paste that info from the data entry layout to the report layout.

I haven't had these sort of problems before, is anyone else having weird things happening with 5.5 running on Mac OSX?