Help with the best way to create report/charts

[stevelach]

Hi im looking to create some charts, but this is my first time working them.
Here is one of the reords:

Steve,12:03:48 PM,12:03:59 PM ,TV Ad,Upholstery,Need Measurements,No,,5/25/2006

im looking to create a chart with a date range and differant catagories.

Its all from a text file.

What would be the best to divide up this string and create differant reports/charts?

Any thoughts would be great. Thanks steve

[leinad31]

Would be best to export that to a database... then you can use queries to get the subset you need (eg. within a certain date range)... and if your needs are simple, you can pass the query's result recordset to the data report. That's just for reports though... and not charts.

[Hack]

There is a chart component available (MS Chart Control), but I've always found that cumbersome to use. On the rare occasions I've had to do charts I dumped my numbers and what not to Excel and used its charting capabilities.

[Al42]

Would be best to export that to a database... then you can use queries to get the subset you need (eg. within a certain date range).

You can read that text file (it looks like a valid CSV format) as a database table without exporting it.

[leinad31]

True if it has to be maintained as text. The import process has the advantage of showing you records that were not imported due to erroneous syntax/structure/data type/etc.

[Hack]

Moved to reporting section