How To Quickly Copy Statistics
Report Formatting To Another Report
Creation Date: March 7, 1998
Revision Date:
The information in this article applies to:
Cactus League Interactive Baseball for Windows
Reprinted with permission from The Games People Play
We Want You to See Double, Triple, and Beyond - The
COPY Feature
A CLIB "how to" for Enhancing Your Replay Experience
By Stan Watson
If you've spent any time in the Statistics module of
the game, hopefully you'll have recognized the potential power plant for custom statistics
reports generation that lies at your fingertips. There are the "canned" Team
Reports for quick reference to individual batting, pitching, and fielding stats. However,
the power of this module really resides in its ability to create customized reports
virtually limited only by the gamer's imagination. If you prefer to create your own Team
Reports, whether they be batting, pitching, or fielding, it's important to recognize that
if you format one report to your own specifications, you've formatted them all for your
season replay. There's no need to format one report for one team, then format the very
same report for another team. If you've already tried this, I'm sure you found out quickly
how time consuming and imperfect the one-at-a-time process can be. When I say format, I'm
referring to options such as font selection and size, normal, boldface or italicized
print, different heading styles for both rows and columns, different statistical
abbreviations, column widths, and even customizing the statistics totals line for each
report. Obviously, if you're in the middle of a National League replay, and you create a
report for one team, you'd like to format that report just once, and have it apply to
every team in the league. The COPY command located under the FORMAT drop down menu allows
you to do just this, and with extremely little effort on your part.
Suppose you want to create customized batting reports for each team in your season replay,
and you want them formatted identically without having to format each report individually.
The process starts with your usual report creation process. You can either hit the Create
Report icon on the tool bar, or select the menu option under the DATA dropdown menu. Then
select the type of report you want to create. For this exercise, we want to create a Team
Report. This takes us to the Team Report Creation window. For now, we're only interested
in creating batting reports, so click the Pitching and Fielding reports off, then hit the
DESIGN button. If you left the "default" toggle checked, when you get to the
Individual Statistics Report Creation window you'll already have the default categories
for your report included. Normally I prefer to start with these categories, and add or
remove any others that I want included in my report. I find this to be easier than
starting with a totally blank report, but it can be done that way if you prefer. Once
you've included the desired statistics in your batting report, in the desired order, click
OK, and you'll be taken back to the Team Report Creation window. Next, you need to
designate which teams you want to have this report generated for. Click the ALL button,
and you'll see that every team in your league has now been highlighted. Hit the OK button,
and now the your customized reports will start appearing team-by-team on your desktop. If
you're using a stock league, you should see 14 team batting reports appear, unformatted,
but containing all of the statistics you asked for when you created the report. Here's
where that COPY feature comes into play. You want to format these 14 reports, but you only
want to do it ONCE. So, with the top report on your desktop, go ahead and format it to
your own specifications. Adjust your column widths, adjust the heading text, height, and
font style, the font size and type in the report, make it so the totals are in bold print,
whatever you want to do. Once you feel you have completed the formatting of that one
report, go to the FORMAT dropdown menu and select COPY. At this point, you'll be prompted
to save each team batting report. Do so, assigning each report a file name that makes
sense to you so that you'll recognize it later towards reopening that file at any future
date. Once you've assigned filenames to each of your 14 batting reports, the magic begins.
The Format Copy window appears showing a "Copy From" box on the left and a
"Copy To" box on the right. The report you just formatted should show
highlighted in the "Copy From" box, and the 13 team batting reports that you
just saved should be highlighted in the box on the right. To be sure, you can see the
names of these files shown in both boxes. Once you've confirmed the report in the left box
is the template you want to use for your other reports, hit the OK button, and
presto...those 13 other team batting reports will take on the formatting characteristics
of that one report you're already worked on. You'll then be given an opportunity to open
all of the files to see for yourself. That's all there is to it. This nifty feature should
save tons of time if you're prone to creating a lot of different types of reports, and you
want to have these reports created for each team in your season replay. And this feature
works for your custom pitching and fielding Team Reports as well. Try it out!
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