excel better? crosstable pivottables in fmpro??

[xyz]

Hello,

some users of excel find it difficult to use fmpro because they haven't the possibility to create a crosstable or pivottable.

==> A crosstable is a summary of 3 tables. A little example. Suppose you have several buildings and you want to view how many studios, garages etc.are in the buildings.

Table 1: building

Table 2: elements (studio, garage etc)

Table 3: building - elements

BUILDING A B C D E

studios 1 2 4 0 0

garagaes 2 3 0 5 6

appts 4 5 5 5 5

The problem is that it should be easy to add a new column for a new building AND that (suppose you have several owners with several buildings) you can create reports for different owners with different number of buildings (using the same report or layout). The number of columns should be unlimited.

A solution?

See you

L

There is a solution for fmpro 6 (http://www.filemaker.com/releases/994.html)

but not for fmpro 7. Some tricks are available but not very usefull for databases where you don't know exact how many columns you need.

[Reed]

Here's a link to one of the better solutions I've found for this type of report.

http://www.onegasoft.com/tools/fastsummaries/index.shtml

Let me know how this works for you.

Dana

[Deep Thought II]

thanks for the link above. i am having a similar problem at hand. the solution above has many codes, so i thought i have to find my own solution again :-( plus everything is in one field, in text form.

nevertheless, to create a cross-tab report, it seems inevitable to customly format the rows and columns and does all the text manipulations by programming.

but i found a better way for getting the values. the above one uses all codes to get the summary, which can be easily done by using copies of the same table and relationship, even if the value depends on 2 other fields or even more, i think.

i haven't compared the two methods, but the coding one does take processing time. the example file has 24,933 records, and takes about 20~ 30 seconds to generate the crosstab report on my Athlon XP 2600+ 1 GB RAM machine.

i think the relationship one should be faster since it gets its values directly rather than calculation...

i do wish filemaker can make making crosstabs and pivot tables easier. for this Access is doing a bit better than FileMaker. although i still find so many troubles and limitations in Access for making pivot table...