The last tab in the Change Group Options dialog box is the Others tab. It lets you decide what to do with the records that aren’t otherwise specified. Since it is possible that some reports won’t need to specify how every value is grouped, this tab accumulates all the remaining values that didn’t get included on the Specified Order tabe. You have the option of discarding these records, accumulating them in a separate tab, or leaving them as their own group.

As an example of when to use the Others tab, consider a company that has five primary products that generate over 90% of its sales and the remaining products produce an insignificant amount of revenue. In a sales report, the five primary products will be listed separately and the miscellaneous products would be put into the Others group.

The Others group is also useful for reports that group on fields where the data is dynamic and new values are added after the report is created. If the new values don’t fall within the current named groups, they get lumped in with the group called Others. To build on the previous sales report example, any new products that are added to the company’s product line after the report was created will be accounted for in the Others group. Once the product becomes more popular and its sales become significant then it can be added as a separate group item.

You have different ways of how to handle items that are not included in the Specified Order tab. The Others tab of the Change Group Options dialog box lets you set how to handle these items.

Figure 3-13. The Others tab of the Change Group Options dialog box.

There are three options for handling how the Others group data is handled. The first option is to discard the data. This is useful when the data is frivolous and you don’t want it appearing on the report. The second option puts all the values into a single group. The default value of this group is “Others” but you can type in a different name that is more appropriate. The third option is to leave the remaining fields in their own groups. They get displayed within the report as they normally would. This is useful when there are a lot of values that get their own group and it would be very time consuming to list each one in that box. Setting this property includes them in the report without you having to list them.

When grouping values into the Others group (or whatever name you give it) it is always shown at the end of the report as the last group.