Putting It All Together
Exporting data from reports in ESC

You’ve had a brutal week. It seems that everything that could go wrong did. You have been working 12 hours a day and the manager of the local McDonald’s just gave you a frequent diner’s discount. This morning you walked into the office to find out that your bookkeeper quit and left the state due to some unfortunate incident involving the county sheriff. To make matters worse your fax machine seems to only want to dial a horoscope hotline that charges $4.95 a minute and your accountant just reminded you she needs your sales tax information across town by 3:30pm today in order to meet the deadline. It is now 3:00pm.

Before you engage in a little primal scream therapy, think for a moment. Don’t you remember your salesperson saying something about the ability to email reports directly out of your Electronic Service Control software? Sure you do. Can’t remember how? Pick your head up off the desk and pour yourself a strong cup of coffee. Then take a deep breath and read on and it will all come back to you. Hurry though, the clock is ticking.

To get this information to your accountant on time we have to do two things: create and preview the report we want to send, and choose the program we want to use to view the data that is sent.

In this case your accountant needs the Sales Tax report in a Microsoft Word format. The first step in this process is selecting the report criteria. Click on your Sales pull-down menu and select Reports. Choose Sales Reports from the fly-out menu to display the following screen.

Now select the information you want to see on the report. To keep things simple, use the default options shown in the previous screen shot. This will give us a Sales Tax report for September, 2002. Select Sales Tax Report and click the Preview button.

At this point we can review our report and verify it reflects the information we want to send. Once verified, click on the envelope icon outlined in red on the picture above.

This will display the following window which will allow us to select our exporting options. Click the down arrow in the Format field to choose the program you will use to view the data later. Since your accountant wants this information in a Microsoft Word format, select Word for Windows Document.

Next, click on the down arrow in the Destination field to select what we want to do with the data we are exporting. This should give you the following options:

Select the Microsoft Mail (MAPI) option; then click OK. This will display an Export Options window. The selections you made on the Export screen will determine the options displayed on this screen. Usually with a little bit of trial and error you can find some settings on this screen that will work well for you. In this case we have it easy. All we have to choose from is if we want all of the report exported or just the part within a certain page range. Select ALL and click OK.

If you have a MAPI compliant mail program such as Outlook, Outlook Express or Eudora, you will now see a blank message with your data attached in a Word format. Simply fill out who you want to send it to and add a subject and body text if desired and off it goes.

If you don’t have a MAPI compliant mail program, such as America Online v6.0 or earlier, all is not lost. Instead of selecting the Microsoft Mail (MAPI) destination, simply select Disk File in its place. This will write the file to the disk in the location you specify. You can then fire up your preferred mail client, attach the newly created file and send it that way.

Mission accomplished! Now go home and give your family a big hug. Life will get better and you can always count on your Electronic Service Control software to help you when you need it.

Once you get the office running like a Swiss watch again, go back and set the Destination field to Application and try out some of the other Formats. See if you can export your Price Book into Word or your Sales Reports into Excel. Once you get them there you can modify them any way you like. Rearrange columns, change fonts, or combine information from other reports. The sky is the limit. Give it a shot. You may find other combinations that will help simplify your work day.