Dear Kutoose,
If I understand correctly, you are trying to create a Standards document and rather than starting from scratch you are looking for ideas and recommendations from the forum and/or an actual document if we have one to shorten your development time.
I don't know if anyone else has such a document. I write reports for companies so I tend to design them the way I like unless they have a particular design requirement.
Here are some tips though:
Name reports consistently and create them with names that describe what they do and when they are run. This helps alot if an admin assitant is charged with running the reports - they can simply sort by name in their report directory and they are ready to go...easy to find the ones that the boss wants run.
For example:
Weekly Mgt Total Sales by Region
Weekly MKT Total Sales by Bracn
Weekly Salesrep Total Sales by Customer
Daily Salesrep Total Sales
Monthly Mgt Total Sales by State
This helps to sort out what a report does and when it is run.
Make it a Standard to populate the File/Summary Info with Author, keywords, Title, and comments. Comments should be updated every time a report is modified with a small indication of what was modified, the date and modifier's initials.
In your reports themselves:
Place the file path at the bottom of reports, this will help you track them down when a user wants you to modify them.
Name formulas, variables, expressions, and parameters for what they do! Make the naming of these consistent across reports.
For example, if you add date range parameters like Start Date, From Date, To Date and End Date to reports; come up with a consistent name for them so that you can copy and paste select statements, etc from report to report.
I create formulas for each Title (Title, SubTitle, DateRamge) on My report. S
Document formula with comments. Document report with a Formula (Documentation?) and insert the text into the formula or use a text box to do the same, you can suppress it and make it a color like green so that it is easy to see in Design, but doesn't show up at all in preview.
Finally, as you are rewriting those 100 reports, keep track of what you like as design standards (logo in upper right, etc.)
Create a template report that you can start from that has as much of your standards included.
The goal of standards is to make the report writer's job easier - so don't get too carried away with rules
Hope this helps,
ro
Rosemary Lieberman
rosemary@microflo.com,
Microflo provides expert consulting on MagicTSD and Crystal Reports.