Welcome. My name is Kendra O’Brien and on behalf of FBS, I want to welcome you to this session on the custom report writer inside Flexmls. In this class, we’re going to take a look at the custom report writer and editor that’s available to you under my reports on your menu.
When you’re working within Flexmls, that help button in the upper right hand corner of the screen is there with a wealth of resources to help you become familiar with the tools inside Flexmls. And so I put some links in here specific to some of the content that we’re going to be discussing today.
So if you’re someone who likes to read through all of the options and you’re a learner who can take that in that information best through written help. If I click on this link within the document, and this is also linked within Flexmls, I can read through the information with screenshots and get more information on how to create my own report. If you have not checked out help.
Flexmls dot com, it has vast resources available, not just on the custom report writer, but on all of the tools within Flexmls. And so it’s a great way to deepen your system knowledge. If you have not checked it out, I encourage you to do so.
I also included a link here, excuse me, to some of the guided help options. If you are signed into Flexmls, these links will take you directly into the system and launch our guided help system to walk you step by step through creating, in this case, customer flyers or a custom business card.
Now, the report writer that we’re talking about today is an HTML editor that pulls listing information from defined locations in the database. If you are looking for more information on the customer flyer creator, which would get you from start to a completed flyer in just minutes. This is not the session where we’re talking about those customer flyers.
This is our deeper dive into the customer report, the custom report editor, where you have HTML controls, you can do pixel by pixel sizing of images and tables.
So this is definitely the more technical report creation tool. But know that if that’s not what you’re looking for, we’ve got resources here and you can absolutely step out of this session. You won’t hurt my feelings in the least.
In this session, we’re going to create a one line report as a way to go through these concepts of custom reports and help you become familiar with the tool that we use to build those reports and that you can use to build and edit reports. At the end of this session, you should be more familiar with that tool and be more confident in creating your own one line report or editing an existing report.
We’ll also just take a peek behind the scenes at the source code that drives that display. So if you are excited for pixel by pixel control and field by field control of your listing reports, then we will get started now.
So within Flexmls, under my menu, I’m going to begin by typing my reports. And you may already know this, but just as a reminder, any of those menu items that have My in front of them are customizable to you. So if you’ve got My Views or My Quick Searches, those are your own customized templates. The MLS will have those options available to you, but in the My section, you can make them work exactly for you.
The reports is no different from that. So when I click on My Reports, I will see a variety of reports, some of which have the square brackets behind them to indicate that that report layout is inherited. An inherited report is a report format that was created either by your MLS or in some cases, offices create an inherited report layout and make that available to their members.
So in that case, an office might have their own template, maybe there’s branding specific to the office, a color scheme that they want used. An office level account or a person with office level broker load, who has ability to add or edit listings on behalf of members within that office, can create a report template and market as inheritable to members.
Member level accounts can create reports for themselves, but they can’t make them inheritable to other people. So in this case, I’ve got a variety of reports showing on the screen, some of which are inherited from logins above mine and some that are my own copy. So if it does not have that square bracket behind it, it’s something that I’ve created from within this login. There are a variety of formats shown here.
These listing reports, items that we see in this list. This list is going to match up with what I would see if I were searching for listings and choosing a report format on that search results page.
The building blocks are pieces that would go into that report format. So if I know that I’m putting my remarks information in the same order, and I want that information in the same way across all property types and report formats, I can create a building block and reuse that information.
Business cards are often one of the first places that people go to edit their own reports because it’s a great way to try out some of the customizations and make a business card that really works for you. We have a walkthrough that’s linked in the handout on customizing your own business card. If you haven’t checked that out, I encourage you to do so.
But the area that I want to focus on for this class is a one liner. So when you’re creating a report, typically the way that the report writer works is that it’s going to display one listing per page, unless you tell it otherwise.
So you can create a summary view, for example, you might have five listings on a page, but for each one of those listings it’s going to repeat the labels and data, the field name and the field values for each listing. So it’s a little bit like if you remember books of listing information, it would be similar to that card display of the listings in a book.
The one liner is much more like a view where the labels are going to appear once in the row at the top and the data will appear in rows below. So I’m going to get started and create a new one line report, so that we can talk through a bit of the process of adding information to a report.
So when I click new, it’ll ask me what type of report I’m creating. I’m going to choose one liner.
And it opens up the report editor to just a blank screen right now. My cursor is in here, but there’s no information on this report yet. At the right panel is where I can add information, add formatting to this report. If you are going to be building your own reports, I do recommend Firefox as a browser, because of how it handles tables.
So when we’re building reports, one of the key things that I like to do when I’m creating a report is to put all of the information inside a table structure. Because that table allows you to define specific information about the report structure so that it will appear as it should whether you’re looking at it on your computer screen or whether you’re printing it out.
If you’re printing landscape or portrait that it’s going to expand to fit the full width of the page. So when you’re creating a one line report, there is an easy way to begin and get that table structure in place. The top option in this right panel is templates.
And there’s an explanation of what a template is, or if you click on it, it’s going to insert that template onto your page. And so what I did just now is put a table structure on here so that I can start putting listing information into this report. And right now it’s just placeholders. So if I click to preview, this is going to look exactly the same.
It’s not pulling any listing information at this point. It’s got my colors in there. I see my table, but there’s no listing data being pulled right now. So when we’re working in the report writer, it’s a bit like a word processor in that you can highlight information, you can change the size, color, or weight of the text.
If I wanted to change everything in this top row to be left aligned instead of centered, I highlighted all of that and I clicked to left align it.
Our next step, I’m going to enter information. And so I’m taking out this placeholder text to begin.
And I’ll actually zoom in a bit so you can see that a bit more easily.
So right now, I’m going to start building out what information I would like to have on this one line report.
I’m going to begin with the listing address. And when I’m building a one line report, I really have I’ve got multiple options. If I would like to type in this label so that it’s exactly as I like, I can certainly do that.
Or if I want to automatically pull from the listing information, under data fields, if I start typing to narrow it down, I have a few different options. Address is a special case here because as you may know, the address is comprised of multiple fields of information. So within as you’re entering a listing, you don’t enter the address in one box and have it stored that way in the database.
You would enter it as pieces: a house number, a street name, the county, the city, the zip code. But within the database, it also can put those fields together into a way that is readable and useful to humans and not just computers. If I choose address, that’s going to include the city, state, and zip code.
If I choose the short address, maybe I’m working in a smaller geographic area, it’ll have the the house number and street name portion, any directional prefixes or suffixes, but it won’t include that city, state, and zip. So for a one line display, it’s really up to you and your search on whether you would want to include the city and state in the one line, or if just the street address is enough.
I’m going choose the short address here to begin. And I double clicked on that field in the selection panel, and it gives me some options. When I’ve clicked on that field, I can choose what I’m going to include.
And again, these terms are defined for you on your handout, so if you’re not familiar with any of these options, please feel free to refer to that handout as a refresher.
But when I’m putting fields in, I can choose if I to include the label, so in this case that would be the word address, the data, which would be the actual data stored to the listing, so the address information, if that’s three thousand four hundred fifteen thirty ninth Street South, that’s the data that would be there. Or I have the option to include both.
When I’m working on a one line report, in this top row, I just want to include the label.
You have the option to show or hide the label if there’s no data in place. For a one line report, would always choose show so that it’s appearing for all of the listings in that search result set.
And if I wanted to override the label, which is to say if instead of short address I just want it to say address, if I click that override box, it’ll give me the option to type something new. This is especially helpful if you have a longer field name that you want to have abbreviated. Maybe in your database there could be a field called number of bedrooms and you want it to say beds.
By clicking override you can type in exactly what text you want that label to display as. And then when I click insert, it’s going to put that tag in directly to the field that, into the place where my cursor was on the screen. So this is our first introduction to one of the tags in the Report Writer. If you’ve ever done a mail merge, this tag structure will be similar.
So when we’re looking at it on this screen, the curly brackets are the beginning and end of our tag. It’s showing a database location, and all of this is going to pull that information from the listings as we work. So in order for the address to show, I need to add the data as well.
Because if I preview this right now, it says address and it’s got a colon in place, but I have no address showing yet. In order to get information to show in this second row, I need to add data as well.
So with my cursor in the cell for that information, I’m going to double click again, and under insert, I’ll select data.
Most times you can leave this data format to auto, but this is where you would select something like currency. So if you’re adding a price, you can add that currency and then it’s automatically going to include the currency symbol used in your MLS. Most of you that will be a dollar sign. So now that I have put this data tag in, when I click preview, it’ll have the address showing.
Another way that this type of structure is helpful is sometimes we’ll get questions from NLSs or from members that want a printout view that includes just the primary phone number for the listing agent, maybe the name and the primary phone number, but they don’t want the additional contact information.
They just want a real summary view, maybe as they’re setting up showings. So in this case, just in the interest of time, I’m going to type in this label. So I’m listing member.
And then rather than selecting it from a data field, I’m going to go just a little bit further down to profile. In the profile section, that’s where you’re going to find any information related to the people connected to a listing.
By default, the profile information goes to current user. So if you’re creating your own business card, for example, you would pick current user and it’s going to pull the names, office affiliation, any of that contact information from your own profile. But in this case, I don’t want my information to display. I’m trying to create a report that has the contact for the listing member.
So under the dropdown, I will choose listing member, and then I’ve got options for I can insert the label, but in this case, I want to bring in the name of the listing member. I’m going to choose the system name.
In some MLSs, people may use the marketing name more frequently. That could be a nickname or just a different name that’s used for marketing, but you’ve got that choice where you can choose their system name, which is typically the legal name stored for them. And then I also want to include their primary phone number.
So under the phone heading, I’ll click primary and it’s going to insert it right where I had highlighted that column data. So I’m going to put in my header here.
So now when I preview this report, instead of those placeholder tags I’m seeing real listing information. The report writer will show you a random listing as you work to feed that information in, but if there is a specific listing that you want to use to preview, you can click down here at the bottom and enter a specific MLS number.
It can refresh automatically for you, so if you’ve got multiple screens up and you want to be able to have that information refresh as you work, you can set it to do that automatically. I want to point out too that whenever you’re building reports, you automatically have both a public and private version of the report. So right now we’re previewing the private version of the report.
If I switch to a public view, in this case, I think I may have too many, I’ve got a bad oh, I haven’t defined my, MLS number. Pardon me. So if I switch to a public view, you’ll see that the information is automatically hidden. In this MLS, the listing member and the primary phone for the listing member are marked as private information.
So if I’m printing out this report from my search results and I’ve selected the public version to give to one of my clients, I can’t accidentally include private information. It’s automatically going to be masked. If I switch back to private that shows then it can be for my agent copy of this information.
So again, there’s no need to create different versions because the information can show and hide based on the privacy levels set by your MLS. Some MLSs allow those private reports to be emailed to others with authentication.
Some have that locked down, but especially when you’re creating a report format for yourself, it’s nice to have, that private information available without worrying that it might be, provided to your clients.
When you’re creating a one line report, the number of rows that are on the screen is very important to remember because that one line report structure really depends on having the correct number of rows in this table. The top row is going to be the one that repeats for all of the listings or that that shows once, excuse me. The label will appear once. The data is going to repeat for each listing.
And if you choose to include it, this third row can include totals. I’m going to borrow a trick from, some of those cooking TV shows, and we’re going to pull one out of the oven already baked. So I’m going back to my reports, and it will prompt me. I haven’t saved this report yet, so it’s going to prompt me that I have entered data that has not been saved yet.
If you want to keep working on it, click stay on page. In this case, I’m going to click leave page. This draft will just be abandoned and I’m okay with that right now. So I’m clicking to leave page.
And in my reports, I have a one line report that I’ve already created that we can use as an example. So within this one line report, I’ve put in the labels. I’ve got the tags for the data, so it’s including that full address. The total number of bedrooms has been abbreviated here to beds, baths, and we’ve got our various tags of information here.
I won’t go through all of those, but then we’ve added some additional information. There are tools within this one line report writer that will allow you to do calculations on the information that’s included.
So for any numeric field, under other, I have the option to add one line math, and it’s all the way down at the bottom in the lower right hand corner. If I click one line math, I’ve got a selection of different calculations that I can do.
So if you wanted to create a report, you’re working in a neighborhood and you want to give some more information about the average days on market for listings that have sold in that neighborhood recently. Using this calculation, you can run this report for any set of search results.
So it’s a nice way to really customize a statistic based on your market and the needs of your customers. So under calculation, I can do the average, the median, I can add things up, have the sum, and I can show my minimum and maximum.
The fields that are available to choose from are just those fields that have a numeric value. You can’t average public remarks, for example, or you can’t average dishwashers, but you can average any field that has a number in it. So this list has main list fields, so those fields that appear when you’re entering a listing on the main tab.
So you can select the fields that are available in your MLS. This list is going to be different for each MLS, so if you look at it and say we don’t have a Geo County field, that’s just fine. When you are building a report you’ll see only those fields that are appropriate for your MLS.
And then if you need to make any changes to the format of the data, if you want it to show with a currency space. If you’re doing a calculation on a currency field, you can have it include that, but otherwise you can typically just leave that to auto.
When I click to preview this report in here, so our minimum, maximum, and average are all going to duplicate what we have in place. Where we’re going to see multiple listings coming together is when we’re using it from a search results page. I’ll show that in just a second, but before we do, I want to point out one other thing that really can make this custom for you.
And that’s that you also have the option in these one line reports and in a listing report to add a report header, a page header, or footers. So if you’ve got branding that you want to include on this, this is a great way to do it.
So if I click on report header, in this case again this is the one we already pulled out of the oven, it’s pre baked, but I’ve added an image, I’ve put my custom coloring that I want to use for my branding, and then it’s pulling in the profile information for the current user.
So if I were an administrator for the Otter Team Realty, I could create this report and make it inheritable to the people within the office. And whenever any member in that office printed this report, it’s going to include the address and phone number specific to that user.
If I wanted to add the current username, I clicked right ahead of this text and hit enter to get myself a new line just like I would in a word processing program. And when I do that, it’s keeping that same formatting that’s already in place.
So in this case, I have a specific font chosen and it’s using white text on my, sort of neutral green background.
And then under profile, I chose current user and added the tag for system name. When I preview, it’s going to show me what that header looks like. So it has my name, it’s got my address, and the phone number that I have saved in my profile, but if another member within my office, were to print this, it would have their own name.
So this is a great way for it to be custom per person in the office if you are at that office level and want it to be available to multiple people. So let’s take a look at what this report looks like on the search results page. And I did just leave without saving, when we review it, it will not have my name, it’ll just have that office and phone number.
When I come to the search results page, this is where I would be narrowing my search. So let’s say I am looking for listings of well, let’s let’s bring it down a little.
We’ll go one million and up in the Fargo Moorhead area. When I click to print, in the left hand panel, it’s going to show a couple of options. It’s going to default to the current listing because I have not gone through and marked any of these listings as selected. But what I want here is to preview this report with all results.
Under detail, I’m going to choose my Otter Realty one line report. And we’re viewing that private version, but this is where I would change it if I wanted to view the public version instead.
And when I click preview here, it’s pulling in both that header that we previewed and the listing information for each of these individual listings.
It’s got my full address including the city, state, and zip, beds, baths, the acres, and then down in this final row it has those one line math statistic that we’ve added. So for the active listings right now in this MLS, active listings with a price higher than one million dollars have an average days on market of two hundred and forty six point six nine.
This is one case where if we wanted less precision here, like if we don’t need to know about those additional two thirds of a day that are in the average, we could set this to have no decimal so that it lines up a bit better with the other calculations. But really, that’s that’s up to us. And then it has my total number of listings.
So if you were working in a neighborhood and wanted to kind of give those statistics, this is a great option for it.
Or if you wanted to have just your own one line report that had that one So as we’ve talked about so far, one line reports are just one introduction to that report writer, but the tools work the same for creating other listing report formats. So if I come in to this list of reports from the MLS, I can create my own report formats that would show here.
I can use those created by the MLS When I’m using the one line report, in order for it to show those multiple listings, I just need to have multiple listings selected, and a reminder that it’s always going to follow the privacy levels for the field structure within Flexmls.
We’ll come back to the my report section now for that quick peek that I said I would give for, the behind the scenes structure.
When we’re building the reports and we’re working within this what you see is what you get view, that’s this this type of display and our ability to preview it, It’s a more user friendly view, but what’s going on behind the scenes is HTML code. And so for some people that is a very comfortable place to be. I personally love to go right into the code because I can see exactly exactly what’s going on.
So if you want to change the background color for just one section or if you wanted to add borders, you have options of doing that right here within the report writer.
So if I right click on a cell, I can edit the cell properties from right within here, or I could do the same if I had an image in here and had put a listing photo in. I can edit the properties of that image from within here. But what that’s also going to do is put the information into the source code.
So under view on the custom report writer menu, the first option is source code. And if I click on source code, it’ll open up this view, which gives me the behind the scenes skeleton of what’s going on. So I have my table, I can see that the hex code of the background color.
So if, for example, you were working from an inherited report and you knew that your company’s branding used a specific shade of gray, or if you wanted a light blue as your background color, you certainly can click to individually edit the cells and get that customized, but this is another option for you if you’re comfortable in this format. We can see on each one of these pieces of information all of these cells have their text center aligned.
If I needed to change something to left, I could do that, but we can try that here and I’ll show you how it affects it.
So if I want just the bedrooms label to be left aligned, and wouldn’t do that because I’m a fan of consistency. I wouldn’t recommend left aligning one, but we’re doing it for the sake of example. So if I click to left align it in the user interface, it’s already scooted over. I can see that it’s left aligned here.
When I go into the source code, and it pops you in right at the bottom, so don’t be alarmed that you have to move up, we’ll see the difference. So we’ve got our cells Each place that you see the t d, that’s an individual table cell. It’s got the background color. My address is still centered, but that bed’s label is now left aligned.
So each change that you make in the report itself is changing the source code. If you make any changes in the source code, it’ll change the report. So those things are tied together. This is just another view of the information and the tags that you’ve added so far. I’ll point out here as well, this is what we can see this table cell, it’s center aligned.
It has the list price, and when the field was added they included that currency symbol.
And so if you ever have, for example, a currency symbol appearing where it shouldn’t be, it’s this portion of the tag that you would look at to get that removed. You absolutely do not need to go into the source code. You can make any of the changes to a report using this interface, but if you are a person who would like to do to get into the source code, you can.
One other thing I want to point out while we’re on this screen is that when you’re working on a one line report or a report format, you can choose which property type you’re working on. So this report has been set up in the residential property type, but in this case, I don’t have a version of it for multifamily.
So if I tried to use my Otter Realty ONE Line on a multifamily listing, it would not show any information right now because there’s nothing here. It has no fields to display.
If I wanted the same information to show on the multifamily property type, I can select all, so I used control a on my keyboard, and then I’m copying, and I can paste that right in. Now if I click to preview, it’s going to have the information feeding in.
A note of caution on that, if you’re using a one line report that has fields that are not common across all property types, those columns would not show correctly. So you may need to do adjustments, especially if you’re moving between property types like something between residential and commercial.
There might be a lot more customization, but you could still copy and paste and then just replace the tags of information for the fields that you want to include.
So again, I did that under the UR editing. That’s also where I picked the header or footer, but that’s where I would pick the individual property types. When you’re working within a property type, the fields that appear in the data field section will just be those that are valid for the property type that you’re in.
So in this case we’re in that multifamily property type, we have fields that were not enabled in residential, so we would not have been able to add the number of units or number of baths in unit one to a residential listing report because that’s not a field that’s enabled. So you’ve got a lot of customization options if there are fields specific to a property type, you can put them in here.
So coming back to the handout, I just want to go through a bit more of the concepts that we’ve talked about, and then open it up for questions as well. So we’ve talked a little bit about the table structure. The table, and again we created that when we started our one line report by using a template.
If we did not want to use a template, I’m just going to back out of here, it’ll prompt me again that I’m not saving, but I’m going say leave.
If I just wanted to create my own, I didn’t want to pull in maybe that color scheme, I do also have the option when I’m on this blank page of clicking table, and then when I hover over the table option, I can pick how many columns I want. And then maybe I know that I’m working on one that’s not going to have any of those statistics, so I’m just going to include two rows.
If I click here, it’s inserting that table structure of a ten column by two row table.
Firefox displays these light gray dotted lines for the table structure, even when there’s no border in place. Other browsers can display those tables differently. So if you’re a standard user of Safari or Chrome and you don’t see some of these dotted lines, try it out in Firefox.
The tool still works, just display of those table boundaries is consistent and user friendly in Firefox. So it is my recommendation to use Firefox when you’re building the tables. And again, we use those table structures so that we can define the space that’s being used. So if I were to put in a listing photo, which we have not done since we’ve been working on a one line.
Under the photos section, and I know that I want to include the primary photo, photo number one is going to be the first photo ordered in the list, but the primary photo is the photo that has that flag marked as primary, so not all MLSs have their primary photos first. If I click to include that primary photo it’s coming in, It’s bringing in an image. If I’m building a report, can also have that caption and description if I want them.
That can be especially helpful if you’re putting creating a photo report to have multiple photos on the page. In this case, I’m just going to put the image in.
And then once I’m on that image, I right clicked on the image.
If I want to make sure that I have a very specific size that I want it, maybe I want it to be a square of exactly one hundred fifty by one hundred fifty, I can create that. But for listing photos especially, I don’t recommend setting both a height and width because it’s going to distort the image to fit that proportion where most listings are going or most listings will have a landscape orientation photo.
So if you ever make a mistake in that case, you can undo and it will undo the last change that you made. So we can set maximum height and width that will put the photo in without distorting it, and I’ll include notes on that in the follow-up from this.
But as we put in those photos and listing information, if we want to constrain the width of certain things, having it in that table structure is really going to give us that flexibility. When we’re entering that field information, again the label is going to be the name of the field. If you want your report or one line report to say bedrooms, need to include the label.
The data is going to be the information that goes with that label. So those two might come in together or they might come in separately depending on your report. But if you want the number three to show for a listing that has three bedrooms you need to include the data.
The profile information is any of that information about people, their names, their email addresses, their phone numbers, and that’s all available under the profile section.
And then a reminder about inherited reports. So there will be report formats in your list that you cannot remove. They are inherited from your MLS or office, but you can certainly create your own reports and use those as your primary as you wish. You can save your own copy of some of those inherited reports by going into them. And I’ll just show that real quick.
So if I come in, for example, to this member’s inherited flyer format, If I click to edit, I can change that report name and it’s just like a save as.
So I’m giving that a new name, Then when I click on save, I have my own copy of this MLS inherited report. I can never change the structure of this that I inherited from the MLS. Let me just refresh my page here.
But now I have my webinar version, flyer one, that I can customize fully.
And just as a reminder, you create if you do the work to create this custom report and you want it to be your standard, under general preferences, you have a preference where you can choose your default listing report.
So if you’ve gone through and you’ve customized, and you know that your new report that you’ve created is what you want as your default when you’re looking at listings, you can choose your own custom report, and when you save that preference when you’re looking at listings in the future, it’ll be that customized listing report.
So I wouldn’t typically recommend that for a one line report since you’re going to want to show more information, but if you’ve gone through and customized your own full report, saving that preference is a great way to put it in use. And it’s similarly with your default business card.
If you create your own custom business card, it’ll appear in this list and you can make that your default so that when you’re emailing listings and include the business card, it’s got exactly the format and profile information that you prefer. With that, we’re going to wrap up today’s session. If you have any questions, please do continue to type them into the questions panel and we will respond to those.
Thank you so much for your time today and happy report editing.
