Report Criteria

This window is displayed when you press the Run button on the Reporting|Reports screen. It is allows the input of the report parameters (which will vary from report to report) and also provides the standard print request facilities.

The non standard buttons are as follows:
Export - click this to to export the report to a CSV file so that it can be processed by another program. Note that for best effect, the report itself may need to be adjusted. That is, if the report has page headers, footers and titles (as is normally the case) then these will also be in the CSV output. Hence making a 'no fancy bits' version will produce a cleaner CSV file.
Export & Email - will generate the CSV file and then bring up an Email window to allow you to send it somewhere

Report Parameters
This area will vary from report to report because the parameters vary from report to report.

If the parameter is a date, then you can use any of the date shortcuts - eg '-2y' for two years ago.

If the parameter is a string (indicated by the data field having resize dots in the bottom right corner like the Location name and other selection boxes above) then you can use a macro to enter the information. This can be useful for entering data which a macro can easily generate but which you have to think about.

For example if you define a macro @cid whose expression is $customer.id, then provided the report has defined the Customer Id parameter as a string, you can enter @cid and press Enter and (if there is a current customer) then the @cid will be replaced by 123456 (or whatever the current cusomer's id is).

If fact a better macro expression to use is expr:var("customer.id", "There is no current customer") because this will warn if there is no current customer.

[Note that for the 1.8 and later releases, the above technique is not longer required because the report can be written to provide the current customer ID (and any other current item value) - see here.]