Creating a simple report

This worksheet describes how to create a simple report consisting of a title, introduction, analysis and a conclusion. It assumes that you have already created any analyses that you wish to use in your report.

You can run your report as often as you like, using the latest data to produce an up-to-date report. Once you have set up the report the way you like it, it will be produced like that every time you run it, with no chance of errors creeping in through copying or cut and paste.

The report is based on the crocodile survey that is provided with Snap.

Summary of steps

Step 1: Creating the instructions
Step 2: Adding content to your report
Step 3: Running your report

Step 1: Creating the instructions

This step shows you how to create a new report and add three instructions to create a title page.

1. Click  on the Snap toolbar to open the reports window. You will see the two default reports.

   

2. Click  to create a new report. By default this will have a Tailor Analysis instruction in and nothing else.
3. Click  on the report dialog and select Information from the drop-down menu to add a new Information instruction.
4. Click in the text pane.
5. Click [Insert] and select Image… from the list of options.
6. Click [Browse] and select an image file. The example shows the crocodile banner Banner-Paper.gif.

   

7. Click [OK] to insert the image, then click [OK] to save the instruction.
8. Click  on the report dialog and select Information from the drop-down menu to add another Information instruction.
9. Enter the title for your report in the text pane. (Report on the Crocodile Restaurant). Leave the Title field blank (this is the title of the Instruction.). Style your title text by selecting the text and using the format buttons. The example below has been set to 28pt bold text.

   

10. Click [OK] to keep your title.
11. Click  on the report dialog and select Page Layout from the drop-down menu.
12. Select Start New Page and click [OK]. This will put a page break in your report after the title page.

    

13. Click [OK] to save the instruction.

Step 2: Adding content to your report

This step shows you how to add some text and an analysis to your report. Although you can create analyses directly in a report, it is a good idea to create any analyses you want first, so you can check that they are the way you want.

1. Click  on the report dialog and select Information from the drop-down menu to add a new Information instruction.
2. Enter some text describing your report.
3. Click [OK] to keep your introduction.
4. Click  on the report dialog and select Execute from the drop-down menu to add a new Execute instruction.
5. Click  on the Execute dialog and select AN14 (the radar chart) from the list.

   

6. Click [OK] to add the Execute instruction to the report.
7. Click  to save the report.

Step 3: Running your report

1. Click the  button on the report window toolbar to run the report.
2. It is often a good idea to check your report on screen rather than sending it to a printer. Click the [Printer] button to check that you are printing to a pdf printer driver rather than a real printer.
3. Click [OK] to close the printer window and then click [OK] to run the report.
4. Your report will look something like this.

   

   You can see that there is information about the chart between the last information instruction and the chart itself. You can stop those appearing by changing the Analysis Definition for the chart.

5. Click  on the Snap toolbar to open the Analyses window.
6. Open the chart AN15.
7. Select the Base/Labels tab.
8. Clear the Reports Include options (the Description, Notes and Title were set in the sample survey).

   

9. Click [OK] to save your changes.
10. Click  on the report window bar to and run the report again.
11. Your report will now look something like this.
    

Conclusion

This worksheet has described how to create a simple report that you can run at any time. It explained how to add text, graphics and an existing analysis to your report.

If you would like to find out more about report instructions see the topic: Types of report instructions.

For an overview of smart reporting, see the topic: The essence of a Smart Report.

For information about creating analyses to add to your report, see the Snap analyses section in the help. This links to descriptions and step-by-step instructions for creating some of the many analysis types available in Snap.

If there is a topic you would like a worksheet on, email to snapideas@snapsurveys.com