Throughout the last few BiLog’s we’ve been introducing you to the new report features in the recently released 7.5 product – while keeping you immersed in acronyms, Boston Red Sox Trivia and other amazing facts on erasers and how long it took to build Rome.

 And while you may expect a trend here to continue,  let me take a slight detour and introduce a new backronym, RTF.  If you’re not familiar with backronyms, it is where you have an acronym – and then find the words to form one.  So – while you would expect RTF in this entry to stand for Rich Text Formatting….it really stands for Reporting To the Fullest.

 I’m pretty sure that one won’t make its way to Wikipedia….so let’s quickly move on to describing another new great feature in the 7.5 release - where you now can input rich text in the long description fields of applications.   This enables you to highlight certain areas of critical information for your users. 

 What’s key for the reporting folks – is that when your users input text in bold, colors, italics or other fancy fonts in the maximo applications, that same formatting will show in the reports.  For all the out of the box reports using long description fields, the rich text font has been enabled.  Additionally, you may have created custom reports which include the long description field.   The steps to update these custom reports to use rich text formatting are shown below.

 To enable your custom report to display rich text formatting in the long description field, there are three simple steps you will need to follow in the report designer.

 1.   First, if the long description field exists in the report, delete it.

2.   Next, insert a Dynamic Text field.

3.   Finally, set the property set and add the field attribute.    

 Once you have updated your custom report, import its updated design file into the report repository, and your users will now be able to see any rich text they input in the maximo applications on the corresponding report.

 More details and screenshots on modifying your custom reports are contained in the V75 Report Developers Guide, detailed here:   http://ibm.co/m2lkeT

 Additionally, you can view the details on the delivered reports which are enabled for RTF display in the V75 Report Booklet, which can be found here  http://bit.ly/jND1CX

Tags:  hoc bi maximo ad qbr format report fonts text analysis bilog