OFFICE EXPRESS HELP ASSISTANT

Professional Software for Professionals

Using Variable and Summary Fields

VARIABLE FIELDS

Variable fields are fields that are, for the most part, not part of the underlying database and the value for the field will not be known until print time.

For example, if you edit your company from the Office Express Home Page, there are two lines of messages that you can print on an invoice, Bill Message 1 and Bill Message 2.

Office Express gives you the opportunity to override these messages just before you print invoices, thus the actual values are unknown to Office Express until you begin to print.

Office Express has a variety of Variable fields to suit almost any need. You use the variable fields mostly in creating invoices, workorders, contracts and job notices.

SUMMARY FIELDS

Summary fields allow you summarize the value of a data column. You can summarize by average, total and count of values.

To explain more simply and in a practical situation, you would use a summary field to "add up" the total of all prices on a contract for example.

As another example, if you were creating a customer balances due report you could create summary fields for total balances due and another for the average of all balances due.

NOTE: You must place the summary fields in the page footer or report footer. If you placed these fields in the page header, logically, because nothing has printed yet, nothing can be totalized. As a rule of thumb, for contracts place the summary field in the page footer, for reports, place the summary field in the report footer.

After you have placed a summary field on the Designer's canvas, right click on the field and select the Summary option. Select either Sum, Average or Count depending on how you want the field summarized.