Subtitles of the Movie

To do equipment reporting and tracking, we can use Visio's custom property feature and also the custom report feature. Now these things were covered earlier in the course in the Data and Diagrams chapter, so here we are going to do a bit of revision and look at an example of preparing a custom report based on data we have entered for the components of our network. So the first thing of course we have to do is have data stored within our diagram that we can report upon. And what we are going to do here is create a report of how many computers there are in each department of in the company, and who in those department the computers are allocated to. So you will see on the diagram there on the screen that I have people's names listed on some of these computers. And if I right click on any of those shapes, first select a computer, right click on it and select Properties, we open up the custom properties window. And already I have added here that the department that computer is allocated to is Administration. And obviously the user of this particular computer here is Bob; over here Sally is using this one, if I right click and select properties, you will see that Sally is in the R and D department. Some of the shapes don't have any particular department or user such as the server here. I click Properties, you will see this screen is blank there. So we have set up the data in the particular shapes, so now we want to aggregate that together and produce a report. To do that we go to Tools, select Report, and this one is going to be a new report that we setup, it's not an existing definition there. So I will click the New button and we want to report on shapes on the current page. I am going to use the 'limit selection' option now because as we saw not all shapes have a department listed, so we don't want our report to include shapes where there is no department. So if I go down the list here and find department, and then click the not equal to (<>) nothing and Add that. So what that means is that we must have something in the Department field before that particular shape will be included in our report. We are going to, yep, that's what we at we are going to report on. So we will just click OK to accept that, and move onto the next one. And here in our report, we'll want to see the displayed text, because that's the person who is using the computer, we want to find out that. And we also want to know the department where the computer is kept. Let's call this report 'by department', so that is the title it will print out on the top of the report once it's generated. And clicking the subtotals, we want to group the information by Department and let's generate account there of the quantity per department there. Sorting won't apply here because we have only got one thing to look at, and the format is not really so important either. Clicking next, this title is the name that appears in the report dialog box that we can select, so we can just type something there. And we will just save it in the drawing, we won't bother to make this available to other drawings. So there we have it, 'computer by department' has been setup. To run the report, we just click the Run button. The run report dialog box now displays, and I can select the style - I am going to select Microsoft Excel (shape) and go OK. Once the report is being generated, we can click OK on the report dialog box here, and let's just zoom in on report here that has appeared on the page. And you can see it's showing us the department, we have got two computers in administration, one assigned to Joan, one to Bob. And we got three in R & D assigned to Bill, Vincent and Sally. So that's the example then of using Visio's features to report on and therefore track network equipment. And I will leave it to you to investigate other possibilities.