Enhanced Drag & Drop Support in the Designer

A frequently asked question was: “Why can’t I see the relations in the report designer?” This question refers to the variable/field window, in which 1:1 relationships were displayed, but not (the usually much more important) 1:n relationships. In short, our answer was always: “The relations are there, but only in the object window, e.g. when creating tables”. We even put the long answer in a Knowledgebase article.

Creating Charts via Drag & Drop

Drag and Drop for Donut Chart

List & Label’s chart dialog offers a load of possible customizations. However, as always, with great power comes great complexity. Even creating a simple pie chart could have taken some time if you’re not yet familiar with List & Label’s chart features. As you can already easily create crosstabs via Drag & Drop, and we just recently improved the table’s drag & drop features, offering a thorough D&D support for charts was the next logical step on our path to a simpler, more intuitive end user desktop designer.

Creating Crosstabs via Drag & Drop

dialogue choose table element type

A crosstab does a great job in aggregating your data and helps to spot trends and outliers. We've put great effort in enhancing our crosstab support for the last few versions. However, although there's a nice wizard to get you started, usability testing showed that even creating simple crosstabs was still a challenging task for some users. That's something we hope to change with LL24.

Virtual Formula Variables for Drag & Drop

expanded data values in tree view

In LL21, we improved the Drag & Drop behavior thoroughly. However there was one thing still missing. When dropping e.g. a date field, at times you don't need the actual date in the report but rather e.g. the year. The same for numerical values – do you want decimals? If yes, how many? Do you require a local formatting? Or a currency symbol? While you can easily achieve any of these formattings using simple formulas or the "Format" property, you have to do just that. So drag and drop is not the no-brainer it is supposed to be in a perfect world. In LL23, the world will actually become a little more perfect.

Enhanced Drag & Drop Experience

multiselect drag and drop
For years, our drag & drop support consisted of "well, you can drag one field into an existing table". If you needed multiple fields – repeat. Creating a table via Drag & Drop? No way. Creating a sub table? Don't even think of it. All this will change thoroughly with LL21.