Building and Saving Reports in Flare

I saw a discussion on the HATT list about how Flare doesn’t have a reporting tool – oh, but it does! So here’s a quick run-down on how to build and save reports in Flare.

First, you find the reporting capability here: Project Organizer > Reports.

Don’t be fooled by the folder being empty – it’s just waiting for you to build a report.

First, right-click on the Reports folder and select Add Report File.

At the Add File page, you’ll see a whole list of pre-made reports in the Factory Templates list. For right now, I selected Unused Items Report and named it Test_Report.

Click Add and then OK. The new report will now appear in your Reports folder and be open for your use.

The cool thing about the report that you see is that it’s got every reporting criteria available within Flare – but since we chose Unused Items, only certain items are preselected. Let’s run the report as is and see what we get.

Oh, one thing I do is select the Skip Empty Reports option. It’s a personal preference.

Click Generate.

Here’s a section of the report:

Great aspects of the reporting tool in Flare:

• You can add or delete to the report as needed – meaning: if you selected Unused Items, those items will be pre-selected but you can add other criteria to the report.
• There are a blue million report criteria to choose from.
• You can open the report in a browser instead of the little window in Flare.
• You don’t need to have Analyzer open (or even have Analyzer at all!) to run any of these reports.

So, try out the reporting tool and let me know what you think. Have questions? Ask away in the comments.