How do you summarize your various reports

[JonathanNYC]

Firstly, thank you Tek-Tip community for the timely and valuable help all year. Health, peace and prosperity to all in 2007.

I am seeking suggestions as to how you summarize or categorize your various Crystal Reports so that people in your organization and other functions may become aware of the various reports (and data) that exists and might be useful to them.

I realize this is largely common sense, but I was considering preparing a table that displays the report name, the nature of the report, and select criteria available to a user. For example, "Turnover Report", this report identifies previous patient out of room time to next patient in operating room time, the user may select a specific operating room number or surgeon.

I don't want to make it to complicated and I probably will attach an example of the report that I reference in the table (when I distribute the summary of reports package). If this inquiry is inappropriate for this forum, please just tell me as much. I use Crystal Reports 10 to pull data from "PSSolutions", which is a scheduling and intraoperative documentation system from Mediware.

 

[IdoMillet]

Actually, this is a good question, though better suited to Forum 4 ("Other Topics").

Creating a report catalog table with this information is a very good idea once an organization goes beyond a certain number of reports. Consider adding to this table other useful information such as Subject, Period (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, ... User Selected), Department, and "Report Owner" (who do you go to when you have suggestions for change or questions about this report?).

If you crate this table in a database, you can create a Crystal report about it and let users search for and filter (via parameters) the available reports based on the columns you included. An excel table would allow similar functionality.

Some 3rd-party Crystal viewers provide a dynamically grouped /sorted grid where you can achieve a similar useful approach for categorizing, locating, and launching reports.

Happy Holidays!
- Ido

view, e-mail, export, burst, distribute, and schedule Crystal Reports.

http://www.MilletSoftware.com

 

[synapsevampire]

How do the users execute the reports? You speak of Crystal as if it's all the same way that users interact.

The method for displaying what is available is probably best suited to the tool with which they execute them.

In some cases I will have links to the reports within documentation, and in other cases I am using front ends which describe the reports clearly, but again you should supply basic information about the user experience, and try to leverage the same tools for displaying what is available, how and why.

-k

 

[JonathanNYC]

Some excellent suggestions, much appreciated.

At first blush, we were thinking of this summary of reports listing as primarily an instrument to inform various Departments at the Hospital of types of data and information that may be useful to them in their job function (e.g., Materials Management (implant usage), Admitting (future cases booked) etc. It was our thought that several Departments may not be aware that they can get this data in a very timely fashion.

Presently, some users request data directly from me, usually via a report request or email. Additionally, we've placed many reports on user desktops that users may run by entering surgical date range or case number, etc. This is done via an adjunct to the Perioperative Software by a product called "PSReporter".

Again, it was the intent to initially just summarize and broadcast the existance of certain reports to potential users throughout the hospital.