Grouping Records

When a report has a lot of pages, it is hard to quickly find information as well as get a general idea of what the report is telling you. Sorting the data helps you find a specific record, but it doesn’t give you high-level summary of what the data means. Grouping records lets you summarize data in a way that the reader can quickly grasp what the report is trying to say.

Grouping records is an advanced form of sorting. It lets you create categories to visually organize the records. You can summarize the data on critical fields and perform summing operations on the data within each group. If you need to see more information you can explore the detail records that make up the group.

Sorting records in a report results in the records being ordered differently than their natural order, but it doesn’t have any effect on how the report is structured. Grouping is different because it creates new sections in the report’s design. For every group added to a report there is a corresponding group header and group footer added. This lets you add formatting to designate when a new group starts and when the group ends. Within each section you can show report fields, formula fields or summary fields. It’s common to make fields in the group header to be a different font (possibly bold) and in the footer it’s common to show sub-totals. The footer gives you a summary of the data within a group without having to read every line. If you don’t need to display the group header or footer, each can be hidden.