Grouping Records

When a report has a lot of pages, it is sometimes hard to quickly get a general idea of what the report is telling you. Sorting the data helps you find a specific record, but it doesn’t help give you a high-level summary of what the data means. Grouping records lets you summarize data so that the reader gets a quick overview of the report.

Creating groups is one step beyond basic sorting. Groups lets you create categories to visually organize the records. They summarize the data based 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 is more simplistic than grouping records because sorting simply changes the order that data is listed. It doesn’t have any effect on how the report is structured. Grouping is more complex because it creates new sections in the report structure and organizes the data based on the new sections. For every group added to a report there are two sections created: the Group Header and the Group Footer.

The Group Header and Group Footer sections are the dividers between the detail data that is printed within each group. They let you show group specific report fields, formula fields and summary fields to the report. You can also format the fields differently so that they stand out from the detail records. For example, it’s common to make fields in the header to be a different font (possibly bold) and in the footer it’s common to show sub-totals. The footer is also beneficial because the reader can understand the data by looking at the sub-totals without having to read every line. If you don’t need to display the group header or footer, they can be hidden.