Hello,

I've been using RE for a few months and am finally ready to delve into my first custom report for our fall appeal. It will be a list of donors/prospects grouped by solicitor showing the 0-4 gifts made by the donor/prospect. I have a lot of experience with Access, which is serving me well with CR, but have come up against these two questions:

1. How do I include the donors/prospects that don't yet have an assigned solicitor? I know some folks don't have an assigned solicitor and they aren't showing up in the report. At least, I assume this is the case since it's grouped by solicitor and there's no group lacking a group heading (solicitor name).

2. How should I export and display the gift information so I can show the last 0-4 gifts and what they're for without creating a new line for each in my report? I'd like the report columns to be Donor, Gift 1, Gift 2, Gift 3, Gift 4. I had an Aha! moment and realized I should export four instances of gift each with the criteria I want (i.e. Annual Fund gifts last fiscal year, Annual Fund gifts from 2 years ago, etc.), but can't figure out how to export gift more than once. It occurred to me if it isn't easy, maybe there's a better way. Or maybe not

3. Anyone know of a good user group specifically for Crystal Reports? Or other good CR resource?

Thanks in advance for the help,

Jenn

I would have expected an unlabeled group, as you did, for all of those without an assigned solicitor.  I guess, to start out, I would check the results of the export file to make sure that a record without a solicitor that should be in the file, is in the file.  Something else you can try would be to specify the group's sort order.  You can do this by right-clicking on the group's header in CR design view and choosing "Change Group."  Use the drop-down in the second field and choose "in specified order."  On the second tab, specify the order for each of the solicitors and then on the other tab you can select to "put all others together" and name the group something like "No Assigned Solicitor."  This is a nice trick to format the report, even if it doesn't solve the problem.

 If you are exporting cumulative giving information using the gift summary in a constituent export, then the best way is to create separate instances of the summary to address your 2nd question.  The way to do this in Export is to select the gift summary fields for one time period and set the criteria.  For each of the remaining periods, click and drag the summary field from the left panel to above the other summary gift.  You will see the icon that drags across change from a single column to a square or a square-on-square icon.  At that point, you can drop the field (release the left-click) and you should get a new box to define a different set of criteria.

Hope some of this is helpful.

 In answer to question 3, you will probably find it more helpful to ask it on the Blackbus User Society (http://www.blackbus.org/).  The most knowledgable and helpful users of Crystal Reports & Raiser's Edge are found there.