Counting types of voter in a precinct

[jess]

I've got a rather large voter registration database (500,000 records) and I need to count how many people are in each precinct and determine the counts of types of voters within.

Its just one big table with ID, Precinct, Affiliation Type. Here is what the data looks like...

ID------------PR-----AFFILIATION

1121001--1108--DEM

1325484--1110--REP

2135113--1110--GRN

I've done it with sub-summary reports, but it breaks it down vertically, and I need it broken down horizontally...so it will look like this..

PR----DEM--REP--LIB--GRN

1108--52---75---12---2

Any suggestions?

Edited May 25, 2006 by Guest

[jess]

Never mind...I think I figured it out. I created a calc field for every possible Affiliation Type and a corresponding Summary field. I then created a sub-summary report by Precinct and placed the Summary field on the layout.

[John Mark Osborne]

This is actually the wrong way to get a report out of FileMaker. Each time you add a voter type or precinct, you will need to add another calculation and summary field. If you use subsummary parts, your report will expand and contract with your precincts and voter types automatically. Just create a new blank layout, double-click on the body part and change it to a subsummary when sorted by the prceincts field. Then, add another subsummary part sorted by voter type. Place the precinct field in the precinct subsummary and the voter type field in the voter type subsummary part. Finally, create one summary field that counts the precinct field and place one copy in each subsummary part (summary field are context sensitive to the subsummary part they are in).

When you want to view the report, sort by precinct and voter type and either preview or print. Now you will have a completely dynamic reporting mechanism that will adapt whenever you add a new precinct or voter type.

[jess]

Mark,

I think I did that originally, but the addtional subsummaries force the output as follows:

Precinct 1107

DEM 117

REP 208

GRN 19

This is great for printing, but isn't as easy when exporting to excel. I needed all of the information on one line when exported. But I definitely get your drift about it dynamically showing new affiliations.

Your the man...thanks for looking into this.

[John Mark Osborne]

Yes, FileMaker doesn't create cross-tab reports very easily. One of biggest requests for the FileMaker engineering teams. There are ways to get cross-tab reports with scripts and other methods so you don't have to add a field each time you need to add a new category.