Desktop Letter
Description
An Alpha Anywhere User Guide to the Desktop.
- Name
- Description
- Adding a Picture or Logo
One common letter design technique is to add a company or corporate logo to the top of the letter. If you have a bitmap image with your logo, you can add it by using the Bitmap tool on the Toolbox.
- Letter Overview
Using the Letter Editor, you can create a customized letter layout that takes data from a table or set, and merges it with text that you create to generate customized form-letters. For example, you have a set which keeps track of invoices, and you want to create a personalized letter to new customers to thank them for their business. This can be done by creating a letter layout.
- Letter Structure
Before jumping in and creating a Letter, it's helpful to familiarize yourself with the Letter Editor. Each letter is divided into regions, and these regions are separated in the Letter Editor through the use of title bars. Each of these bars has an outline button which allows you to show or hide regions. Clicking the button when it displays the minus symbol (-) hides the region(s), while clicking the outline button while it displays the plus symbol (+) shows the region(s). These buttons only affect what displays in the Letter editor, they do not change how the Letter appears when it is printed or previewed. as you work with the editor, you may find these buttons helpful in reducing the amount of clutter you see on the screen.
- Ordering and Selecting Records - Letters
There are two ways to specify the records to print and the order in which they print. You can either save the criteria in the Letter layout, or prompt the user for the criteria at print time. These options are not mutually exclusive, so you can choose to save order and selection criteria, and then make changes to the criteria just before the Letter prints.
- Putting a Conditional Sub-report on a Letter
The following example shows how to put a sub-report, which containing variable content, on a letter only when specific conditions are met. The first step is to define the sub-report, which in this case is named "foursomes". This sub-report displays the data from the table FOURSOMES, which is sorted by the foursome field. The result is the firstname and lastname fields from the records that have the same foursome value.