Use Labels (View > Labels) instead of data columns for captions in your reports. It’s amazing how much you save in terms of data transfer. And your Data Set looks better too. Microsoft, why don’t you use this consistently on your standard reports?
Quick Reporting Tip
Labels are great, but only for list reports that require the same language captions throughout the report.
If you for example want to use multiple languages on like Invoice reports, where in one run multiple invoices for different customer languages are used, labels won’t work. This because the labels are sent over to the reporting engine only once.
Yes, you are right. Maybe I should have written a full-size blog post, instead of a quick-tip-aside. What I am referring to is situations when you create a text caption, bind it to a data column, and then show it as a caption in the report. WTF?! 🙂
And you don’t need to look deep in NAV to find the first example of this. Just look at report 1 🙂
You are soo right. I myself you Labels all the time on my list reports..Its crazy not to
There are so many standard reports by Microsoft which not only not use labels, but they also forget about the IncludeCaption property. I have it in my blog’s todo list 🙂
And while they’re at it, let them then also normalize the used units. Currently they’re using mm, inches, points and what not all mixed up in a single report.
They even manage to use 2 units on one control (i.e. mm for width and points for height) and then in the very first next field use 2 completely different units.
But then again, i guess it’s a different topic 😛