Deck the halls with Report Writer

Business Situation

The holidays are around the corner and your organization is looking to send season greetings on each invoice to all customers. However, the traditional Microsoft Dynamics GP text comment is all too dull and does not reflect the image or the character of your organization. Your marketing team has spent some good hours designing a holiday banner and would like to see it on the invoices at all cost.















Lets take a look at some cool ways to deck the halls with Report Writer.

Solution

For this example, we will work with the SOP Blank Invoice Form report.

1) Open the Sales Transaction Entry window, select an invoice and click on the print button. When the options window is displayed, select the Blank form type and then print to screen.





















* Click on image to enlarge

2) Press CTRL + F9 on your keyboard to modify the current report. This will open Report Writer with the report in the layout window.

3) We will now add a picture to the Picture library to include on our invoice. In Report Writer, go to the Resources menu and select Pictures. This will open the Picture Definition window.












NOTE: Due to Dexterity limitations in color management, you will need to reduce the number of colors of your graphic image to 16 colors (4 bits per pixel). The file size must be less than 32KB which corresponds to the size limitation imposed by Dexterity.

4) Click the New button to enter a picture name, say Season_Greetings. Click inside the gray area, and paste the image from the clipboard with CTRL+V. Click OK to save the image.



















NOTE: The picture must be loaded with a graphics editor, like Paint for example, and have been captured with the Copy feature of that editor. This will send the image to the clipboard.

5) To add the image to the report layout, click the Picture tool button in the Toolbox window. This will activate the visual cue indicator.






















6) Click on the area of the report where the picture will be placed, for example on the footer. Size according to your display needs.










7) Return to Dynamics GP and grant security to your modified report. If the report has been previously modified, you are done!

8) Execute the report and verify it meets the visual requirements and complies with your company expectations.

RELATED ARTICLES:

How to get large amounts of text to look good on a report - by David Musgrave @ Developing for Dynamics GP.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MIS, PMP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

Comments

Greg Parker said…
What happens when it will not let you paste anything. My image is 16 color and about 9kb and is fairly small yet pasting does nothing.

Any assistance is appreciated.
Thanks,
Greg
Mariano Gomez said…
Greg,

Thanks for your question. Make sure you are positioned in the area where the image should be pasted. Typically, the area will be sorrounded by extremely fine dotted lines. Use the Edit > Paste option on the menu to try to paste your image.

MG.-
Anonymous said…
How can I show the logo in the report to two different companies in the logo?
Mariano Gomez said…
@Anonymous: You can get more information along with an example on how to accomplish this at RW - Conditional Logos Example

MG.-
Anonymous said…
Looks good, but how to get dynamic images in reports. So for example, when i print off some report with Item details we also get the image that has been attacted to it in the drawing group.

Any help on this would be appreciated.
Mariano Gomez said…
@Anonymous:
Report Writer does not support dynamic images. All images must exist within the dictionary.

As an alternative, you could use Word Templates.

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