How to Use the Group By Function
Bravo has a wealth of information about your store. Bravo also provides tools to help you manipulate the data so that it is in a format that is the most useful to you. Today we are going to talk about the Grouping function within Bravo lists and ad hoc reports.
When you are working with a list of data or ad hoc reports, it sometimes helps to have it broken out into more manageable chunks. There are several ways to accomplish this. You can sort the list or filter the list. You can save the list into Excel and perform your own independent manipulation of the data. But what if you want to group the list, or sort the data by more than one column?
Bravo has a function that will allow you to group data together, add sub-totals, even change the way data is grouped.
For example, if you are looking at your active loans, you may go to Loans/Buys and click on All Active.
If you wanted to see what loans were out for a specific customer, you could sort by the customer, but if you wanted to dig deeper, or even print the list with the customer's easily separated you would want to group the data.
Right click on the title bar in the column that you want to group. Select Group By This Column.
Bravo will resort the data and provide a list that has each sub group broken out.
Bravo now has all of the same data grouped by the customer. To see the individual lines for each customer, click on the arrow to expand the list.
If you need to further group the list, right click on the title row again and this time select Show Group Panel.
This will open up the Group Panel. If you need to group by a secondary column, you can drag it to the group panel and place it in the order that you would like to see the items grouped.
You will now have your items divided by the first grouping, and each of those can be divided into several sub groupings. In the example below, the loans are grouped first by customer and then by due date.
The Customer is the main group and the Due Date is the sub group.
If you are using a date column, you can change how the grouping is calculated by changing the group interval. Right click on the group criteria (in this case Due Date).
Select Group Interval. This will change it from Daily (each date is its own group) to what ever other interval you select - for example by month. This will group all loans that are due within the same month together.
Now instead of seeing all loans due on May 23, we can easily view all loans due for May 2018.
You can further manipulate the data by selecting how the sub grouping is calculated.
Bravo defaults to show the count of items. So when you are looking at a grouped report, you can see that Customer A has 10 loans total with 5 loans that were due on May 1, 2 loans due on June 13, and 3 loans due on June 17. If you would rather see the amounts of these loans, you can change how the groups are summed.
Right click on the grouping that you would like to sum. Select Group Summary Editor.
The Group Summary Editor will open.
From here you can manipulate how the summary is calculated. For example, to see the sum total of loans for each period, I can select Amount and then click on the check box labeled Sum.
After clicking OK, Bravo recalculates the list.
To make adjustments to how you see the grouping quickly, right click over the Group Panel. This will give you three options
- Full Expand
- Full Collapse
- Clear Grouping
To see every line item, right click over the group panel and select Full Expand.
Bravo opens all of the sub groups without having to click on each arrow.
To go back to the the collapsed version, right click on the summary panel and select Full Collapse.
Bravo will collapse each sub group and go back to the original view.
When Grouped lists are printed, they will print in the expanded view.
To clear one of the grouped selections, right click on it and select Ungroup.
This will remove the group criteria that you selected.
To clear the grouping entirely, right click on the group panel and select Clear Grouping. (This will ungroup the entire list)
To hide the group panel, right click on the title row and select Hide Group Panel.
Group By is available in every screen where Ad Hoc Reports are available. To learn more about ad hoc reports, click here for the article, and click here for the video.