Reports with customized fields

[Anja]

Hi,

i store my leads as Business Contacts. One of the customized fields i
entered is the type of business. Now i want to run a report (or show a pie
chart) that shows which types of business are mostly interested in my
products. I can't find a way to show a report that sorts by my customized
field "type of business".

Is there a way to do this?

Thank you very much.

-anja

 

[Chris]

There is no report that shows exactly what you want, but you can get
this information in several ways.

The easiest is probably to show the custom field you've added in the
Business Contacts view:
1. From the Business Contacts view, right-click on the column header
and select Field Chooser
2. In the drop-down at the top, select "User Defined Fields in
Folder" (I know, this is completely non-obvious. I can only apologize,
and try to fix it in subsequent version)
3. Find the custom field you've added, say "Business Type" and drag it
into the view.
4. Right click on the Business Type field and select Group By This
Field
5. You now have all your contacts grouped by Business Type, and each
group shows the number of members in that group.

Alternativey, you can customize any of the Reports to show the custom
field:
1. Choose a report, say, Business Contacts by Account
2. Click Modify Reportm, then expand Custom columns (near bottom of
Modify Report pane), and select your custom field.
3. Now within each account, you can sort by business type. It won't
show you the number of records with each value as the view does, but
it is in the report.

Hopefully these will give you some ideas to get what you need. Please
do let me know if you have any other questions.

Chris [msft]