12 — Reference
Report options
Components carry presentation options, and every one has a sensible default chosen when your template was built. You will rarely need to touch them — this exists so that when you want something to look different, you can name what you want rather than describe it.
They fall into five kinds. Each component’s own options are listed under Advanced in the report library.
- What the figures cover — Where the history starts, and whether a component follows the report’s date or the latest data available. The judgement here is about integrity rather than looks: an audit or reissued pack must not show anything newer than its stated date, and most client-facing reporting is better showing a blank than a stale figure.
- Which periods and series appear — The time periods shown as columns, and how many comparison lines are drawn. Periods can fit themselves to the available track record, which handles short histories for you — turn that off when a pack needs identical columns across portfolios to read consistently.
- How a list is cut and ordered — How many rows a ranked list shows, how rows are sorted, and whether a total appears. Alphabetical suits a disclosure list someone needs to look a name up in; by weight suits anything meant to show where the money or the risk sits.
- How precisely figures read — Decimal places, and whether returns are broken into income and growth or shown as an excess over the benchmark. Precision is audience-dependent — what reads as rigour to a consultant reads as clutter on a client summary.
- How it looks — Styling, colour treatment, headings, and whether interactive tooltips are active. Tooltips are worth switching off for anything going to print, where they cannot be used.
Options can be set for a whole template or for a single report, so a change does not have to be made component by component. Tell us what you are after and we will set it; where you would rather adjust these yourself, we can open that up.