Method:Classic General Q&A

Re: Report Designer: Help with Charts

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:33:48 GMT

Without actually building your chart it's hard for me to provide support on the report designer. My response below should be a solid starting point but if you have further questions on this specific chart then you should probably contact us for paid support. It helps to have some formal programming background when diving into a custom report.

Inclusivitie:
...break the proposals down by month and then show the number "Closed - Won" and the number "Closed-Lost" or "Cancelled."

From this line I can see you're trying to put together a report with 3 qualifiers based on the Opportunity.Stage field; Closed-Won, Closed-Lost and Cancelled. Qualifiers translates to series in the report designer so you want a bar chart stacked with 3 series'.

Your first series needs to have a data filter to show Opportunity.Stage = closed-won, second series is Opportunity.Stage = closed-lost and last series is Opportunity.Stage = cancelled.

Next comes your argument properties, so how do you want to scale the data (over time)? You mentioned breaking it down by month so your scale type should be DateTime right? Now what argument did you want to scale this data on? (take a cue from that DateTime selection in scale type and guess which field you need to select here).

Lastly your value properties may or may not apply for you - use this section if you need to further process the raw data into something useable. Eg. If I were building a chart that needed to show the total value of the opportunities for a given month, I would use SUM([Opportunity.ExpectedRevenue]). This would total my data by month (based on the argument properties).

Hope this puts you on the right path.

Re: Report Designer: Help with Charts

Inclusivitie — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:45:39 GMT

I have already tried reverse engineering it by looking at several monthly reports that already exist and the default chart showing the overall win/loss/cancelled ratio. The issue I am having is creating one that will first break the proposals down by month and then show the number "Closed - Won" and the number "Closed-Lost" or "Cancelled." I basically want the OppCloseRatio report that shows the percentage break down to show a montly progression, as that is the report I have been looking at.

Re: Report Designer: Help with Charts

Anonymous — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 19:27:34 GMT

Inclusivitie:
I have been working with the report designer for a while now and I am trying to create a Bar Stacked chart showing the number of Opportunities Won and Lost broken down by month with one bar for each month. I have tried using the data filters in the Data tab but to no avail. I seem to be able to either get it to show the win loss ratio for the whole period or just a count of opportunites closed by month but not the closed status.

I can see you've already been linked to our webinar series on reports but there was a blog post from 2010 specifically talking about charts. In addition, here's a link to documentation about creating a report from DevExpress (the creators of the Report Designer).

Your best bet in the report designer is to start by opening a chart and reverse engineering it. For example, the sales opportunities by month might be a good starting point. I find it helpful to open up 2 instances of report designer; in the first instance I open a Method created report and with the second instance I try to recreate that report with the data I would rather have.

Without looking at the report you're currently working on it would be very difficult for us to troubleshoot what's not working. We do offer customization for reports but at double our normal rate for consulting (due to the difficulty of creating reports).

It seems like you have a good understanding of the report designer currently so a little more time and the answer will probably come to you.

Report designer mastery comes with time.

Report Designer: Help with Charts

Inclusivitie — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 17:33:48 GMT

I have been working with the report designer for a while now and I am trying to create a Bar Stacked chart showing the number of Opportunities Won and Lost broken down by month with one bar for each month. I have tried using the data filters in the Data tab but to no avail. I seem to be able to either get it to show the win loss ratio for the whole period or just a count of opportunites closed by month but not the closed status.