Have you ever run out a report only to find the need to change the sorting of a specific field once the output is in Excel? This can be quite taxing, especially if you run multiple reports with a lot of data on a regular basis, and if you need to sort multiple columns on the same report. Fear not though, as Sage Intelligence has you covered. If you’d like, you can apply data sorting to your fields even before running your reports, which will save you some extra steps after they are generated. In this tip, we’ll show you how.
Take for example the data set shown below. This is raw data that has been run out to Excel. You can see the customer names have not been arranged in alphabetical order, and I would like them to be.
Normally, we would have to first run the report and then start configuring each column within the sheet (raw data sheet) using Excel functionality. This can be time consuming if you have multiple columns you want sorted, and even if you link your template back to your report in the Report Manager, the next time you run it the data sorting is gone. The way to get around this is to set the sorting within the Report Manager, once and for all:
1. In the Report Manager, choose the report you would like to apply the sorting to.
2. Then click on the “Sort Fields” tab.
3. Next, click Add on the right of the tab. A dialogue will appear showing a list of the fields in the report.
4. Select the ones you would like to sort on and click OK.
5. Once fields have been added to the tab, you can change the precedence by which they’re sorted by dragging them up or down or by selecting one and using the Move Up and Move Down arrows on the right. Items higher up will have a higher precedence.
6. If you would like to change whether a field is sorted in Ascending or Descending order, then you can select it and use the Asc/Desc button on the right.
7. Once you’ve finished configuring your data sorting, you can run your report. In my case, I only sorted on my Customer Name field. You can see now that the data in my source sheet has been sorted accordingly.
