Kitchen Example - Customising your Output

Transcript

Simple customisation, by which I mean changes which don’t generally require you to understand the way that QuSheet actually processes your data in order to produce its output, basically comes down to some of the tables, styles and generation parameters. Not all of them, by the way – the ones we don’t cover now we’ll leave for the next presentation, when we’ll also be looking at Headings, Selectors and Entries.

So let’s have a look at a few of these Tables first.

If you recall from the previous presentation, you can change a table, or a field for that matter, either within the Workbook area, which basically applies to all Sheets, or individually for a given Sheet, and the way this project has been structured is to have some of the parameters set in the Table Additions area under Sheet and the rest in the Workbook.

However, just to illustrate how these two areas are essentially the same, you’ll recall how I said that a Delivery miscellaneous entry was automatically set to work as a Fixed unit, well that’s because if you look at the _unit table under Workbook you’ll see that it’s set to “fixed” for Delivery.

Three other underscore style table entries that have been set in the Workbook are the _tax rate, the _general intro paragraph and the _general farewell paragraph. These have been defined here to stop the + Table Additions area from being cluttered up with entries that would never change from one customer to another.

Jumping across to the Generation parameters, this is where you’ll find the title that appears at the top of the output, plus a number of other parameters which you can experiment with. Note how the yellow help pane changes to reflect what you select to tell you what a parameter is all about (this is generally how the help system works here).

You may wish to put in some graphics here like a company logo or what have you. Do beware though – this logo isn’t packaged in with the file that QuSheet produces, which means it will only be displayed if your client is logged on to the internet and can access whatever the picture is wherever it’s found.

Finally we get on to the styles, which is where pretty much all of the options for display format are set. As with tables, there are quite a lot of these defined, and some (the ones beginning with a Z) are always present, but again as with tables I’ve given the ones that I think you’re likely to want to change a name beginning with an underscore.

Ok – so taking them from the top down:

_color (center), under default, defines the background colour for the central area.

_general lines, again under default, defines the background colour for the general hello and farewell paragraphs.

_heading style defines the display options for the headings line, either at the top level or by item. The four sub-tabs, Pre Op Total, Op, Post Op Total and Explanation, refer to the four possible columns in the output (as you can see here). Not all of these columns are always displayed, and the default tab can be used to specify something applying to all the columns (so, for example, you can see here that headings are left aligned by default, but the second heading is over-ridden to be centrally aligned). Note that the default tab settings also apply to the indentation area, which is why the background colour for the headings is set individually rather than setting a default.

_headings for item, which as you can see here is based on the _heading style, primarily sets the type of display for the line to FIXED, which means the output is actually defined by the style, and then sets the various names for the heading columns. The final column doesn’t have a heading so this is cleared out and the background set to the same as _color (center) (like we saw earlier).

_item line is the basic style used to show a line item. Other styles build from this, but this one in any case sets the background colours and the currency specifier for the third column, which is always a total price.

The next three _item line styles build on the _item line style by defining the units to use with the different types of item (by unit, by meter and by meter squared). Note that there is no style for fixed price line items because fixed price line items don’t appear at this level – they appear at the level above.

_specific lines, again under default, defines the background colour for the specific hello and farewell paragraphs.

And finally you have _total line, which is the style used to display one of these total lines at the top level, and which you can see sets the currency for the second column.

Actually, that’s not quite the end. There is one other style which you need to keep an eye on: z default, the style that defines everything which hasn’t been defined anywhere else. The background colour defined here, for example, gives you the colour used right at the top and bottom of the sheet.

You may have a few questions with respect to how styles work after looking at all this – like, for example, what happens if you set something else rather than colour in the _color (center) style. Well, this is what all those presentations in the tutorial area, under support, are there to explain. As I’m sure you can guess there is a sophisticated style search system here, and I’ve simply used this to set certain parameters in certain places to make things reasonably easy to find. Feel free to experiment, but bear in mind it’s easy to get muddled up if you start specifying parameters all over the place and forget where you’ve set things.

Ok, next presentation I shall be explaining how this project works with QuSheet and showing you how to change the output groups, set up new ones and how to set up different pricing models (i.e. like a price per gallon).

So let’s have a look at a few of these Tables first.

Ok – so taking them from the top down:

_color (center), under default, defines the background colour for the central area.

_general lines, again under default, defines the background colour for the general hello and farewell paragraphs.

_specific lines, again under default, defines the background colour for the specific hello and farewell paragraphs.

And finally you have _total line, which is the style used to display one of these total lines at the top level, and which you can see sets the currency for the second column.