You may be working with the Software Support group on a report issue and be asked to edit a report formula. There are several different types of formulas included in a report. This article will focus on "substitution" formulas. A "substitution" formula, will look at the field data and substitute a different form of the data.
Here is an example:
The date in the database reflects the timezone where your server is located which is different from the timezone where your office is located. You may want to change the database time shown on the report to the local time. You can do that with a substitution formula. This substituted date formula is already included in many of the stock reports, from Recalls to Certificates of Calibration. **note: This example is from a very early version of MET/TEAM. For more information specifically about date format editing please contact softwaresupport@flukecal.com
Steps to edit a formula:
1- Open the report. This will require that I have permissions to the location of the MET/TEAM reports. If you don't know where these reports are stored, follow this article:
How to find MET/TEAM Report Files
2- Make sure you have permission to open the report from that directory. If you do not, contact your IT department or the person who can grant you permission.
3- Any time you are modifying a report you should save the file as a different name. So if you are modifying "Cal Cert W TSR" for instance, you can save it as "Cal Cert W TSR_mod" indicating it was modified.
4- Modify the existing formula by right-clicking the formula in the report and choosing "edit" or by locating it in the list of Formula Fields and double-clicking it (View>Field Explorer then expand Formula Fields). Hint: a formula field that substitutes a database field in a report will have an @symbol as the first character.
If you want to keep the old formula text, "Comment out" the old formula by putting a series of "//" characters at the beginning of each line. Then paste the new formula in below it that will replace it.
If you don't want to keep the old formula text, you can just paste the new formula text right over the old. The following screen shot uses // to comment out the old formula.
5- When you are finished, click "save and close" and make sure there are no errors.
6- Save the report and put it back in the location you found in step 1. Again, you will need proper permissions to the appropriate directory.