Report writer in Pastel

[Martinco]

Hi Neville,

I have never used report writer and would like to know how to write a report that can give me the following:
1) Customer names
2) Total sales for a specific period
3) When last the customer bought
4) What products the cust. bought
5) Customer tel #

Can you give me an example ?

[Neville Bailey]

Hi Martin,

Two points I wish to make regarding Report Writer:

• Report Writer only works with General Ledger accounts, not Customer/Supplier/Inventory codes;
• I personally do not like Report Writer - it is old, clunky and limited in its application, as I've pointed out above. The Business Intelligence Centre (BIC) module is FAR more flexible and elegant for customised reporting, as it pulls any data (not just GL data) from the Pastel database into Excel, which can then be manipulated to the nth degree.

I am aware that you do not have the BIC module and that you would need to upgrade your system in order to get it, so I have another option for you.

Even without the BIC module, I can set up an ODBC data link between your Pastel database and Excel, and design an automatically populated report along the lines of your request.

This is not to be confused with printing reports from Pastel to Excel - this "pulls" raw data from Pastel into a pre-designed Excel template report.

Let me know if you want to proceed further with this, and we can go off-forum with the detail.