HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
Five Easy Steps to Produce A Simple Report
INFORM/V is a menu-driven system. This means that you create reports by
responding to a series of questions, or prompts, printed on the screen by
INFORM/V. You do not even have to be a good typist, as most of your
answers can be single letters or numbers.
The first menu you see when you run INFORM/V is the Main Menu. This menu
contains ten options; among them are: define a report, produce a report,
modify a report definition, and preview the report layout. In turn, each
of these ten options calls up other menus and prompts.
It only takes five easy steps to produce a report with INFORM/V:
1. On the Main Menu, choose option 1, which stands for
DEFINE A REPORT.
2. Tell INFORM/V what data structure--database or INFORM/V
Group--you want to report from. Your database
administrator will tell you whether you are reporting
from Groups or databases.
3. Tell INFORM/V the name of the specific database or group
from which you want data.
4. Tell INFORM/V what data you want by typing in a series
of numbers. The menu lists the data names that are
available, and you enter the numbers for the ones you
want.
5. Tell INFORM/V whether you want the report displayed at
the terminal or printed by the printer.
In addition to these basic reporting steps, INFORM/V also includes
powerful optional features to enhance the reports and make them even more
meaningful for you.
* You can sort the data in ascending or descending sequence, and can
subdivide it for readability.
* You can get several kinds of summaries (totals, averages, counts,
maximums, and minimums) on the subgroups of data within the reports.
* You can limit or restrict the data you retrieve: for example, you
might get sales data for one district instead of the whole
organization, or you might get a list of customers whose account
balance is above a certain amount.
* If you choose, you can control certain format specifications, such as
page size, printing of heading or title line, etc.