Dressing them up, changing their colors, controlling their width, and even stacking them. Susannah Jones from Elie Tahari, Ltd. tells you how.

Information Builders' John Gray explains how to create Excel macros in versions of WebFOCUS prior to 7.1.

Is there a way to Print Parameter date if user is inputting Parameter date in a certain format? The answer is YES, and, as always, there are more than 1 way to obtain the result. Warren Hinchliffe from Link Market Services shows you the technique.

Mickey Grackin explains many of the formatting options available for designing WebFOCUS reports using the HTML and PDF output formats – and discusses the differences between them.

Susannah Jones from Elie Tahari, Ltd. provides a key sheet for all of the WebFOCUS color names deriving their hex value, their RGB value, and a block of the color itself.

Dennis Van der Vieren from Qwest Communications explains the technique on rotating column header text to reduce horizontal space on HTML reports with ACROSS columns.

When using ACROSS in a report rendered in PDF format, it is often necessary to apply word-wrap to the horizontal sort values that appear over each column, in order to reduce the width of the report and avoid paneling, but there is no WebFOCUS Stylesheet syntax forces word-wrap of the Across data values. Jack Gross, IT Consultant from Midwood Data Services, explains his method of wrapping.

Taken from a Focal Point discussion, Joey Baloun, Consultant from Information Builders, explains how to add Description Fields to PMF’s Measure Detail Report.

How to validate Date (calendar) controls in a guided ad-hoc HTML page? There are so many problems with users not entering the date in mm/dd/yyyy, even when it is specifically stated on the screen. Tom Flynn from SunGard Higher Education and Jeralee Seaburn from Hercules Tire share the JavaScript to do this validation.

There are a couple of topics regarding subtotal placement but the items being grouped and subtotaled are hard coded. We had a business requirement that stated the grouped subtotals were dynamic and would range from 1 to 100 depending on the time period selected. We did not want to hard code that many groupings, HOW? David Smith, currently with Brinker International working in the Business Intelligence group, shows you how to allow dynamic grouping of subtotals and subfoots, using the McGyver technique.

We are all encountering problems now that many companies are upgrading their Office application solution to Microsoft Office 2007. The main reason for these problems is that Microsoft have decided to move away from support of macros and formulae etc. in a "single page web archive" or .mht document. One result of this is that many companies are deciding to retain at least one machine (or VM Ware image) with MS Office 2003 installed such that templates can still be "tweaked" when necessary. This is an unnecessary overhead for many companies and an alternative approach is required. The good news, as always, is that you can work around this issue by utilising scripting of MS Excel. Now the question is, HOW? Anthony Alsford, now working for Information Builders in the United Kingdom in the Professional Services Department, shows you the trick here.

When there are casual users trying to access many different directories, datasets, applications, etc. how to make customer friendly self-service interfaces? Harry Cleveland, Assistant Director of Enterprise Reporting Services from Temple University, explains this simple query tool with screenshots and code.

Wondering how JavaScript can be integrated with WebFOCUS products? Alan Bell, formally an IBIer and currently a free-lance consultant and trainer for Information Builders product set, presents an introduction on switching from the GUI tools and hand coding your web forms via JavaScripts and HTML.

Jim Zimmerman from U-Haul explains a way to report on the contents of the user.htm file in basedir.

Hideki Kirihara from EXA Corporation of Japan represents a solution to produce a report from a large sequential, compressed dataset on MVS. The advantage is that, decompression and code-conversion are done at the same time without any work files, and therefore less network time, less code conversion cost.

Information Builders' John Gray updates "Zulu Time" by showing how to automate switching time zones from EST to EDT when reading the botsched file.

A very special and exploitable relationship exists between an html page and Excel XP. The Finance Group in the Millburn, NJ, warehouse of fashion design firm Elie Tahari, Ltd. exploits this feature, and discovered a way to save 12 man-hours every day.

Is there a way to open a drilldown report in a new tab, rather than a new window? The answer is yes. Check this method from Marilyn Patchen Beyer of Minnesota Department of Education.

Impossible to have a conditional drilldown on an ACROSS value? Ken Lane will show you the technique of making it possible.

When the only available data is hire date and termination date, how to create a “headcount” report by month? Emily Maxwell, Report Developer from Administaff, explains how to resolve the challenge by using loops.

Darin Lee, Senior Systems Analyst from Workers Compensation Fund (Utah), explains the technique of using ReportCaster and APIs to generate reports and sent the output to any desired printer.

An age old problem for many developers: how do I get the data into the hierarchy FOCUS file? Steve Simon, Senior Officer from State Street Corporation, shows the technique step by step.

Have you ever thought: why this is not giving me what I want? Joyce Halford, WebFOCUS Center of Excellence Consultant from U.S. Bank, explains the debugging technique to determine what is actually happening in a report when what you want to happen isn't.