About Formatting Financial Statements

All formatting of financial statements is controlled by the Financial Statement Designer's formatting commands. For more information about controlling tab size, tab headings, font size, and style, refer to the help and documentation for Microsoft Excel.

The most efficient method for formatting the area and the text within a cell is to create a style that includes various attributes (such as bold text, currency format, right alignment, and so on), and then apply the style to spreadsheet cells.

Adding Title Lines

The first five lines of the report specification are the title lines, which are repeated at the top of each tab of the report.

You can specify up to five lines that will appear at the top of each tab of a financial statement.

You can only define one set of title lines in a specification. All title lines must be together (contiguous).

If you have defined more than one set of title lines, Financial Reporter uses the last set in the specification.

If you want the title to appear only on the first tab of the report, leave the first column for these rows blank. The rows are transferred "as is" to the beginning of the Report range.

Note: If you use the Financial Reporter \T line, you cannot separately mark a group of cells as title lines. Title lines must be consecutive, and cannot be split by a tab break.

Adding Explanatory Comments (..)

We suggest you begin every specification with a few comment lines describing it, and add comments throughout to explain important sections of your specifications.

You can make any line of a report specification a comment line by starting column A with two periods. For example, the following four lines are in cells A1 through A4 of a report specification:

Grid Lines and Other Report Formatting

You specify all formatting for financial reports in the Financial Statement Designer's using Microsoft Excel formatting commands.

For example:

• To select the character font, bold type, left or right alignment, number appearance, cell borders and patterns, you use the commands in the Font and Alignment groups (on the Home tab of the Excel ribbon).
• To turn the spreadsheet grid on or off for printing, and turn on or off the row and column labels, you select options in the Show group (on the View tab of the Excel ribbon).
• To force a tab breaks in the printed report, use the Set tab Break command in the corresponding position of the report specification. Set the tab break in column A of the spreadsheet. (Note that the cell containing the tab break creates a vertical tab break as well as a horizontal one.)

All formatting applied to rows or columns in a report specification is applied to the rows and columns of the generated report.

To see the effect of all tab formatting in the Financial Report Designer, click File > Print to see a preview after you have used FR View to generate the report.

Hiding Columns and Rows

It is often useful to have statement columns and rows that you don't want printed on your final report. For example, you may have statement rows that contain intermediate rounding calculations.

To hide a column, you can do either of the following:

• Right-click the column, select Column Width, and then set width to 0.
• Click and drag the edge of the column until its width is 0.

To hide a row, you can do either of the following:

• Right-click the row, select Row Height, and then set height to 0.
• Click and drag the top or bottom edge of the row until its height is 0.