The Reporting Problem

Peter Alcibiades palcibiades-first at yahoo.co.uk
Tue Jun 16 08:32:14 EDT 2009


Bernard,

The problem comes monthly.  My little report generates monthly sales totals
by category, and also year to date by adding together the months.

However, also once a month, my guys have a meeting, at which they take a
look at the last months sales, and want to compare them with the previous
year, same month.  Then they want to take a look at year to date, and
compare that with the previous year.  Both of these by category, like
handtools, powertools.

The way I do this at the moment is that they generate my card report by
clicking on a button which does update report.  This runs through the whole
file from scratch and fills in the few dozen fields, and as far as it goes,
this is fine, and the nice thing is, they can do this, and print the card,
whenever they want to check on how the month is going, and they really do
use this.

However, come month end, I now need to compare categories for (eg) July and
YTD with the same ones the previous year, so each month I manually key the
closing data into a spreadsheet, and this generates the variances, which I
then make some effort to analyze into price variances and volume variances.

The thing that is irritating is having to rekey the data.  I also worry that
were something unfortunate to happen to me, they would have to write the
reports part themselves from scratch, to extract reports from the file. 
That would be pretty tough for them.  They'd have a csv file, but nothing
really to run against it.  Also, they can't take the report and stick it
into a document, edit the style and so on.  The only way is to key in the
numbers again by hand.  It all seems very cumbersome.

So I'm thinking, if I redo it in awk at least there would be a text file, so
it would be importable, reformatable etc.  Now, I have a page with 50+
fields on it, and I don't know how to get the data out of them into a text
file in a reasonable way, or into a text file and display that in a field
perhaps, in the first place.

Andre's suggestion of XSLT is probably right, but its also probably beyond
my limitations.  But the problem really is, how to generate the report in a
format that some other package can use.  I had given up generating reports
in a spreadsheet because as you start hitting tens of thousands of rows, it
chokes.  Rev is much much faster.  But then the problem is, how to get stuff
out of it.

Take your point about a database.  Sqlite would probably be great for it. 
Andre is right about awk, its not very maintainable.

Maybe we just keep rekeying.  Its not the end of the world, you just feel
there has to be a better way.

Peter

Bernard Devlin-2 wrote:
> 
> 
> What kinds of things are you wanting to do in your reporting that you
> currently cannot do?
> 
> 

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