You got here by clicking "Inventory Grid" from the >Reports>Inventory Reports Menu.
This report provides a quick method of viewing important fields in your entire Inventory Database. Its main purpose is to allow you to find possible errors inadvertency introduced into your Inventory Database's "Dollar" fields. Should you run other Inventory Reports, with ridiculous results, such as total retail value in the billions, for example, you could run this report to easily find the invalid entry.
"To err is human... to really fowl things up requires a computer!"
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I learned a long time ago that computers are really quite stupid. Mistakes that would be readily apparent by a human are quite often completely ignored by a computer. However, the computer tries to understand what the operator means, and substitutes meaningless data in its place. Everyone knows that a book shouldn't cost a million dollars. These invalid values and numbers do sometime get into your database, really fowling up the works. |
One very common way that ridiculous numbers are introduced is when an operator keys in non-numeric data into fields that are expecting numeric data. i.e. you computer is expecting the cost of a book. You should have typed in 4.89 instead you typed something like 4.8$Tony. This give unspecified results. We try to edit out errors with the software, but we just can't anticipate each and every possible error. Who knows what the computer substitutes when it tries to convert 4.8$Tony to a dollar and cents value!?
When you run the program, and your data is first displayed, it is completely unsorted.
The reasoning behind successfully using this feature to correct your Inventory Database problems is that the values that are corruption your report/data will generally be extremely high numbers, or numbers less that zero. The Inventory Grid Features allow you to sort your fields in either ascending or descending order by just double clicking the desired column.
The example, below shows that the "RetailPrice" field is sorted in descending order. I accomplished this by just Double-clicking in the "RetailPrice" column. If you have any Database errors are present in this field the will LIKELY show up at the top of the list when the fields are sorted in Descending Order
The next example, below shows that the "RetailPrice" field is sorted in Ascending Order. I accomplished this by just Double-clicking in the "RetailPrice" column again. If you have any Database errors are present, causing Negative Value Totals, this field the will LIKELY show up at the top of the list when the fields are sorted in Ascending Order.
In order to keep you from humanly fowling your computer, we decided to NOT ALLOW you to make changes in place. A small error could totally corrupt your Inventory Database. The data present is "Read Only". We do, however make it reasonably easy to make corrections. When you place the cursor over the ISBN of choice, and Single-click, the ISBN is loaded into your System Clipboard. You can past the ISBN into any of the menus that you will need to correct.
