2.1 Report Settings and Localisation

Before using Report Authority, it is important to ensure that all application settings are set appropriately. To access the settings,
select File > Options:

General

Template Folder

The template folder must be set to the folder which will contain the Report Authority templates (*.rapt). If a user opens a report which is based on a template, but the template is not located in this folder, then the refresh links process will report an error that the originating template cannot be found.

The template folder can be set to be a shared network drive or a folder in SharePoint. This way – any changes to the templates will result in all users having access to the amended templates at the same time.

Other

The settings in this section can be used to change how zero [“0” or “-“] and negative values [“-100” or “(100)”] are displayed in Report Authority.

Report

This section is only available when a document is open. This is where many of the fields of data that are populated during the new document wizard can be amended, such as report name, default scale and currency.

Date/Number format

The correct date and number format setting is critical for the following two reasons:

This dictates the format that Report Authority will display numbers and dates in the report; and
This is used by our tagging algorithm to determine the report content to be tagged. For example, if the data and number format setting has ","s as thousand separators (as indicated in the screenshot above), and you are tagging a number that uses spaces as thousand separators, Report Authority will not accurately tag the number. i.e. if an attempt to tag the number "1 234 567.78" was made and the tag was dragged and dropped into the "234" substring, the tag will be placed as follows :1 [234] 567.89. In order to correctly tag the number such as "[1 234 567.89]", the date and number setting must be changed to a language with the appropriate setting. If any doubt, refer to the three preview text boxes below.

Please note that Report Authority formats dates and numbers based on the regional settings of the computer. For example, if the date and number setting is "English (United Kingdom)", Report Authority will inspect how this setting is defined on the computer. It is therefore possible that two users with the same Report Authority document might experience different behaviors.

Long date: Many regions include the day of the week as part of the long date format, for example "English (United States)" as indicated below:

In this case, you would need to provide a custom long date format string to override this such as "d MMMM yyyy":

Report Styles

This section is only available when a document is open. It gives control of the appearance of the report (font family and sizes) as well as tables (colour and content of headers and table lines).

The position of the note column can also be amended to take into account how primary schedules are typically produced locally. As an example, in the UK, the note column is to the right of the description column, whereas in Denmark, it is usually the first column of a table.

Report Template Links

This section is only available when a document is open and it was created from a template. It provides the ability to link a report to a different template or to break the link to the template allowing full editing of the report.