Hi Princess,

I haven't got a huge amount of experience with Report Designer, but I have edited a Nominal ledger report based on sorting the data in amount order, so I'm sure similar will apply to sorting in date order.

Firstly pick the report you wish to run, highlight it in the report browser window and then click on edit.  Report designer opens. At this stage it is a good idea to save the report as something else and save it in My Reports as you don't want to mess about with a main report    

In the Data menu, click on Sorts and then in the window that opens, click on Add and them you can pick the variable you wish to sort by (in your case it will be Date) choose ascending or descending order, click OK and then OK again to close the window. Save the report and close the report designer window and then run the report and see if you get the desired effect.

The report designer may vary slightly depending on which version of Sage you are using.

Hope this helps.

Depends what SAGE report you are running but what you could do is save it as a CSV file then sort it by date order in excel.

Regards

Mark

Princess wrote:

---

I am just a bit disappointed that you can't sort by clicking on the column heading like you can in Quickbooks

---

You can do that (in recent versions - not sure when they introduced it) in things like nominal/supplier/customer activities.

The reason it can't be done in reports is because, by their very nature, when you're looking at them on screen you are looking at what you would get from the printer if you printed it instead of previewing it. That's why having it on screen is *called* a preview, and the reason the sort has to be set up as part of the report design as I described above.

Edit: As an afterthought, although it's not quite the same, you can also sort this way in the financials' screen - which is a list of all transactions - and in the corrections screen, which is actually the same as the financials. In both cases, you can apply a search so you could look at, say, all bank payments between two dates from a given bank account. And within the corrections screen, you can double click on a transaction as if you were going to correct it - and in the dialogue box for making corrections, if you click on 'Edit' you'll see (for a supplier payment, for example) the invoice the payment has been allocated to.

Princess wrote:

---

and double click on a row to open the transaction behind it

---

It used to do something like that in nominal/supplier/customer activities - if a transaction had a '+' to its left you could double click on it and it would open up in a tree-like structure to show more detail about the transaction (eg, a supplier payment would show you the invoice(s) it was allocated to). Some versions back, though, they adopted the double pane approach - so now just highlighting a transaction reveals that structure in the lower pane.

But the reason you can't do this in reports is the same one I've just given: On screen it's just a preview of what would have been printed.

Having said that, they are starting to build that sort of functionality into some reports - if you preview a P&L report, for example, you can double click on a line to preview a report on the underlying nominal codes, then double click on that to preview a transaction report.

-- Edited by VinceH on Sunday 17th of February 2013 09:28:45 PM

It is possible to make Sage change the sort order for reports - though I've found it doesn't work for all reports; though it may be that I've messed something up when it hasn't worked.

The sorting is applied to the transactional data within the report - so if it's a report that is broken down in some way by account (eg a transaction history of your sales ledger accounts), the accounts would still be listed alphanumerically by the account ref, but you can have the transactions for each customer sorted any aspect of the transaction. Which by the sounds of it is what's wanted anyway.

Go into the report designer for the report you want to change. I think the "Sort" options are on the "Report" menu. Click on that and you'll get a sort dialogue box. If there's no sort already set up, click on "Add", and if there is click on "Edit" to change it.

You need to specify the variable that's being sorted - variables in the report designer correspond to every different thing that can be input in Sage (and more besides); every field in a supplier ledger account, for example, or every field in a transaction. The variables are in two halves - a group or table, and the variable within that group.

So, to sort on transaction date, you choose the group AUDIT_HEADER, and the variable DATE - and then choose ascending order to put the oldest first.

Note: Wording might vary, because I can't be bothered to open Sage and check.