QUICK TIPS

Working with Discoverer Plus Reports

• Finding and opening a report –On the “Open Workbook from Database” dialog box, key in any portion of the workbook name you wish to locate in the “name contains” field. For instance, to find all Grant Accounting reports you would key in ‘PS_’ which will immediately restrict the workbooks that show in the list of values to just the‘PS_’ workbooks. To the left of each workbook name, you should see a “+’ sign (if not, click the drop down box to the left of the “name contains” field and select “Workbook Tree”.) Click on the “+” to see a list of all the worksheet/tabs/reports contained within the workbook. If you highlight the worksheet, any description provided for the report will appear in the bottom portion of the “Open Workbook from Database” dialog box. Either double click the worksheet name or highlight the worksheet you wish to open and click ‘Open’.

Workbooks with Multiple Tabs/worksheets – Once you have opened a report, you can switch to another tab/worksheet within the workbook by clicking on the tab. To locate worksheets that may be hidden from view, use the navigation arrows on the bottom right hand corner to scroll left or right.

• Use the Refresh option – to run the same report that you have open but with different parameters without having to close and re-open the report.

This can be done one of two ways:

  1. Click on the orange ‘Refresh arrow’ on the toolbar, or
  2. Click ‘Tools’, ‘Refresh Sheet’ from the menu bar.

• Deleting Columns – if you have determined that there is a column of data that you do not need (and deleting it will not affect the other data you see),you can delete it by doing one of the following:

  • Click on the column to highlight it, and then hit the delete key, or
  • Highlight column, click ‘Edit’, ‘Remove from worksheet’ from the menu bar, or
  • Right click on the column, click ‘Remove from worksheet’.

• To Rearrange Columns – click on the column heading until it is highlighted, hold and then drag it to the desired heading location. Do not release the column until you see a thick black bar to the left of the column you wish to move the item.Alternately, you can right click on the heading and select “Move To”, then select ‘column header’, move your mouse to the right and select the location to which you wish to move the column.

• Dragging Column Headings to the Page Item Section – click on the column heading until it is highlighted, hold and then drag it to the Page Item section, but do not release the item until you see the thick black line to the left of the position you wish to place the item.Alternately, you can right click on the column heading and select “Move To”, then select “Page Item” then move your mouse to the right and select the location to which you wish to move the column header.

You then have the opportunity to limit the type of data you see without changing the entire report. Simply toggle or select from the drop down box(es) to make choices from the list of Page Items. Note: Be careful of the ordering of your Page Items. They are relational which means that the Grand Total of your report may be different depending on the order of your Page Items.

• Dragging Page Item Headings Down to the Body of the Report – Click on the left side of the Page Item heading until the down arrow appears. Then, drag down but do not release the item until you see the thick black line to the left of the position you wish to place the item. Alternately, you can right click on the heading and select “Move To”, then select ‘column header’, move your mouse to the right and select the location to which you wish to move the page item.

• Undoing the last change - You can undo the last (and only the last) change that you’ve made to a report by either clicking ‘Edit’, ‘Undo Edit Sheet’ from the menu bar, or by holding down the CTRL key and typing ‘Z’.

• Print All Combinations of Report – Click ‘File’, ‘Print’ from the menu bar and then check the box – ‘Print all Combinations’. This will allow every Page Item combination to print automatically without the user manually selecting the different combinations.

• Edit and Find – To quickly find a transaction #, vendor/employee name, $ amount, etc. – click ‘Edit’, ‘Find’ from then menu bar and enter the desired information in the Search text box. Then, select ‘Find Next’.

• Changing Column Size – to enlarge or reduce column size, move your cursor over the right edge of the column until the bi-directional arrows appear, then grab the right edge of the column and move it in/out to the desired location, or highlight the column, right click and adjust the numerical column width.

• Allowing Text to wrap in columns – if you want to allow a long text field to wrap rather than truncate text if it exceeds the column width, right click on the column, click ‘Format Heading’, click “Wrap words in cell” box, and click ‘OK’.

• Renaming Columns –right click on the column heading, select “Edit Heading” and type a new heading. This is a way you can adapt your report to match your department’s terminology.

• Query Governor – In order to reduce the chance of receiving an error message about “query timed out or did not retrieve all rows”, Click ‘Tools’, ‘Options’, and ‘Query Governor’ from the menu bar. Increase the time limit for query retrievals and also increase the number of rows to be retrieved. Or, another way to be sure all rows are retrieved is to click ‘Tools’, ‘Retrieve All Rows’ from the menu bar.

• Print Preview – Before wasting paper with reports that may not fit on one page, try a Print Preview to be sure the report looks the way you want. Click ‘File’, ‘Print Preview’ from the menu bar and pay attention to the last column being captured. If all of your columns do not fit on one page, either change the size of your columns, allow words to wrap in cell or click ‘File’ and ‘Page Setup’ from the menu bar, select the ‘Table’ tab,click the “Fit to:” radial button and set ‘Pages wide” to “1” and ‘pages tall’ to “9999”, OK.

• Saving Reports with your Specifications – Now that you have your report looking the way that you want, save it so that you don’t have to make these changes again. Click ‘File’, ‘Save As’ from the menu bar, then choose a name your report. Any report you save will be saved with your computing id as the owner. Only you will be able to see your report unless you share it with another computing id. Reminder: If ISDS makes changes to the predefined reports, your saved versions will not pickup the changes until you pull up the new version from the database, redo your changes and resave.

• Sharing reportsOpen the workbook. From the main menu select File, Share. In the upper right box enter the computing id of the person that you wish to share the report with, then click Go. Highlight the user id in the “Available” window and use the arrow to move it to the “Shared” window, click OK. NOTE: Never share with a Integrated System responsibility or with "Public".

• Reports Training – Most users now have the basic knowledge needed to run reports and many want to know more (i.e. adding additional fields, making other format changes, etc.) Logon to the Integrated System, Employee Self Service, Learner Home to learn more about the Discoverer courses offered and to register.

Updated 8/31/17