Recollector User’s Guide

Generating Printed Reports (with a wizard)

This section describes how you can easily generate a printed report, for your entire collection or for a subset, and customize the report to fit your needs. This is done using a “wizard” invoked by selecting Generate Printed Report (with wizard) from the File menu.

A printed report consists of three sections:

1) A cover page.

2) The body of the report, containing entries for all the records. This section will have as many pages as needed, with each page printed compactly, containing as many entries as will fit.

3) [Optional] One or two indexes, allowing you to index the entries in the report by one or two of the database’s fields.

Here is a view of what the main part of the report (the body) looks like, with a thumbnail image of a single page on the left, and a full-sized view of a couple of entries from that page on the right:

This example shows several features of the report that reflect its compact format:

• Not all fields in the collection database are shown; only those fields that you select will be included in the report.
• Multiple records are printed on a single page.
• Images are shown as thumbnails, large enough to help identify the object, but small enough to allow a compact overall presentation. You can select the maximum thumbnail size, and the program will scale the images to stay within the specified size limit.
• The images, which represent a field in the database, are shown without field labels, since a label such as "Image" is, in most cases, unnecessary.
• Where there is space to include more than one field on a single line, this is done.
• An entry number (in the left-hand margin) precedes each entry. These numbers are used in conjunction with the report's indexes (described below).
• In the example shown here, the entries are sorted by the ID # field. You can specify any field for sorting the entries in your report.

After you pick Generate Printed Report (with wizard) from the File menu, the wizard window will be shown. The wizard takes you through a sequence of steps, letting you provide the information needed to configure the report you want. The following illustrations show the sequence of pages displayed by the wizard. You move from one page to the next by clicking on the Next button. You can also use the Back button to go back to an earlier step to modify selections made earlier. Only when you get to the last page is there a Finish button that will start the actual processing and printing of the report.

Initial wizard page (introduction):

Wizard page for step #1:

Choose whether your report will cover your entire collection, or just a specified subset. (If you have not defined any subsets for your collection, this page will only allow you to report on the entire collection.) You can also choose the font size that will be used in printing your report.

Wizard page for step #2:

Choose which fields to include in the report's entries, and also choose the order in which the fields will be listed within each entry.

• If you select the first radiobutton, the fields that are currently displayed in the List view will be the ones shown in the report. (The list at the lower right shows this set of fields and their order.)
• If you select the second radiobutton, then you can precisely customize the set of fields, and their order, that will appear in the entries of the report. Click the Choose button to bring up a dialog that lets you select the fields that you want. (This dialog is essentially the same as the Field Selection Dialog.) The list at the right will reflect whatever choices you make in the dialog.
• If you select the third radiobutton, a drop-down list will appear below the radiobutton box, allowing you to select a Field Profile. The fields that are defined by the selected Field Profile will be shown in the list at the right. (If you have not defined any Field Profiles, this radiobutton choice will be disabled.)

Once you are familiar with generating reports and have found a report format that you are happy with and that you expect to re-use in the future, it makes good sense to define a Field Profile that reflects the set of fields (and their order) that you want to use in your reports. (See the section on Creating and using Field Profiles for details on how to define a Field Profile.) Once you have created an appropriate Field Profile, it is easy to complete this step in the wizard: Just select the third radiobutton and then select the particular Field Profile from the drop-down list.

This page in the wizard also lets you make some choices for images. If your selection of fields contains any image fields, these will be displayed as thumbnails in the report. In general, images are self-explanatory and so there is usually no need to show a label (with the field name) in front of each image. If, for any reason, you do want to include field name labels for images, turn off the Omit field labels for images checkbox. (Note that if an image field name is enclosed within parentheses, as in the (Image link) field shown in the example above, the field name label is always suppressed, both in printed report entries and in the Item Details view.) This page is also where you specify the maximum height and width for thumbnail images in the report.

Wizard page for step #3:

Choose how you want the entries in the report to be ordered. You can either use the current sort order of the List view, or you can choose any field as the sorting field (whether or not the field is one of those selected, in the prior step, for inclusion in the report’s entries), as well as choosing ascending or descending order.

Wizard page for step #4:

If you want your report to contain indexes, specify that here. Each index will be in the form of an alphabetized list, one line per entry, showing the value of the chosen index field, along with the corresponding entry number in the report. (Each entry in the report is numbered in the left-hand margin, as can be seen in the example at the top of the page.) You can also request that the index show the value of the ID # field (in addition to the index field and the entry number). The following image shows part of a page containing an index:

Note that if an entry’s value for the index field is too long to fit on a single line, the index entry truncates the text and appends ellipses (…).

After you have gone through the pages of the wizard and made your choices, click the Finish button. The program will ask whether you want to proceed to a full run, or whether you would like to generate just one page, as a test of the choices you have made:

As you can see from the information displayed in this dialog, if you request a test page then only the first page of the report (excluding the cover sheet, and also excluding any indexes) will be printed. After printing the test page, the program will ask you whether to go ahead and execute a full run, or whether to re-enter the wizard to make adjustments to your choices. If you choose to go back into the wizard, all of the choices will be as they were when you previously completed the wizard's steps, so you will only need to make selections for anything that you now want to change. On pages where no changes are needed, just click Next to move to the next page, and repeat until you get to the last page and can click Finish.

When the wizard has completed and the report has been generated, the program returns to wherever it was before you invoked the report wizard. Any choices you made in the wizard, with regard to fields, subsets, font size, thumbnail size, etc., are changed only for the duration of producing the printed report, and the program’s prior settings are reverted to automatically when the report is complete.

A few hints for generating printed reports:

• As noted on the dialog, above, it may take some time to generate the entire report, especially if you have included images (since it takes the computer a while to re-size each image to the requested thumbnail size). A progress dialog will be displayed that shows you how the report generation is progressing (and includes an Abort button, in case you decide that you want to cancel the current report). Pages will begin to be sent to the printer as they are ready, even as the program is still working on formatting subsequent pages.
• Since the report sends its output to a printer, you can use any printer that has been set up for your system. For example, if you have a “virtual” printer that generates PDF (e.g. Acrobat Distiller) rather than sending output to a physical printer, you can easily generate a PDF file for your entire collection.
• If your printer supports duplex printing (printing on both sides of the page), this is useful in reducing the amount of paper needed when generating a long report.

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