My Favorite FRx Shortcuts

Hey these are my absolute favorite FRx shortcuts.

Lots of these are for beginners, but I’m hoping some seasoned pros might pick up a new trick or two. Even with 15 years experience with FRx, I learn something new on almost every engagement. And you’d be surprised how long it took me to discover one of these!

1. The Drill Icon—try the Drill icon next to the Generate button in the report catalog. This brings up the report as it was the last time it was generated. This is a huge shortcut and keeps you from regenerating a report if you haven’t made any changes to it.
2. Control-C, V, S, X, End, Home, and Shift-Control End—I LOVE these shortcut commands that work throughout Windows. Using the Control key, C to Copy, V to Paste, S to Save, End to jump to bottom of a row format, and Home to jump to top of a row format (sadly, this is a no-go in the drilldown viewer). Just like in Excel, Shift-Control-End will highlight a row format to the bottom right corner. Then, still holding the Shift key down, you can use the arrow keys to adjust the highlighted portion as needed. I use this to highlight an entire column, for instance—it’s sooo much faster than highlighting with a mouse, and it gives you way more control as well.
3. VCR buttons—meaning the navigation buttons just below the Generate button in the report catalog. These allow you to scroll through the reports one by one. And you can use these to speed up the process of correcting or reviewing settings in the catalog. For instance, what if you’ve created a standard footer on one report and need to add it to all the rest of your reports? Copy it (I use Ctrl-C), move to the 1st catalog with the far left VCR button, Paste (I use Ctrl-V), Save (Ctrl-S), then use the mouse to VCR to the next report. Repeat for every report and you’re done.
4. Edit>Add Rows from Chart of Accounts in a new row format, and Edit>Add Reporting Units from Chart of Accounts in a new reporting tree. Both these commands can save a LOT of typing.
5. F6 key—it’s the shortcut back to the Control Panel (the opening FRx screen).
6. F3 key—ok  confession time. It took me about 10 years to discover that the F3 key drops down almost any dropdown box in FRx. {smile} It’s a big favorite of mine and I’ve used it constantly since discovering it. I think it saves a lot of time that would otherwise be spent going to the mouse, and it’s a lot easier than Alt-Down Arrow that is its Windows equivalent. (It doesn’t work in the report header section in the catalog.)
7. Column H in the row format, Link to GL—this column has a dropdown box that allows you to look up an account number in the chart of accounts for the company you’re logged into.
8. Launcher—I love to use Launcher for selecting multiple reports and generating them all. Big timesaver over having to generate them one by one.
9. Navigation icons—in the report catalog, I make heavy use of the Open Row, Open Column, and Open Tree icons. This is the fastest, easiest, smartest, most efficient way to open one of the building blocks associated with a report.
10. Include All Units—when your report has a tree associated with it, you can set the catalog to automatically process all units in the tree as opposed to having to mark them in the dialog box that pops up. In the catalog, go to the Report Options tab, then to the Tree Options tab, and select Include All Units.
11. Starting Unit—just below the Use Reporting Tree section in the catalog, there’s a dropdown box for Starting Unit. It depends on how your Tree Options are set, but often this will process just the one unit that you select in this box. This is a timesaver because it can keep you from processing the entire tree if you only want to look at one unit. When you’re finished and want to go back to processing the whole tree, then be sure to drop that box down and choose None.
12. Find/Replace—Ctrl-H brings up the Find/Replace dialog box (or if you’d rather use the mouse,  it’s found in the Edit menu) which is great for making sweeping changes. I often find it helpful to mark the option to limit the action to the current column.

There you have it—and I hope that if F3 is new to you, that you’re nowhere near your tenth year of FRx experience!