Crosstabs: Expand Sub Tables in the Interactive Preview

example crosstab

As we swiftly proceed through the development process of List & Label 22, we found a slot to add one more feature to the crosstab. Starting in version 19, we've added a lot of interactivity to the preview, including a feature called "Expandable Regions" for the report container. It allows to expand sub tables by just a click. For LL22, we've now extended this feature to the crosstab.

Select Your Property Favorites

This is one of the major UI visible changes in LL22. All objects have their distinct set of properties which is displayed in the property window. Depending on the complexity and flexibility of the object, the list of properties is quite long where most of the time you probably don't need 50% of them. Enter the new Property Favorites.

Intelligent Franking with Internetmarke

The process of getting snail mail ready for posting can be rather tiresome. You print your letters or invoices, enjoying the fine work you have done designing them in List & Label, and then? Even in our modern times you lick the stamp, assuming you have the right one at hand, and stick it on the envelope. How very old-school is that? With the upcoming version 22 of List & Label this process can be elegantly automated through Internetmarke, a service to pay for postage online by German courier company Deutsche Post AG.

Building a Better Databinding Ecosystem for Delphi

Data provider for Delphi

The IDataProvider interface for .NET has enabled many features that are not available for all of the other platforms so far. Most importantly, it brings multiple report containers and nested tables. For C++, we've included a sample in LL21. This is sadly missing in Delphi. In addition, the current Delphi data-binding engine still works against the BDE, a technology that has been deprecated quite a while ago by Embarcadero.

Keeping Groups Together in Report Outputs (.NET, C++)

Sorry for the gonzo title of this blog post – I just couldn't resist. I actually started working for combit in 1998 which is a full 18 years ago. And this is the feature I was asked for the most. No kidding. From the early days, way before we had the report container, people wanted this one thing – keep groups together. The reasoning is simple, if you have rather short groups but a huge number of them, you don't want page breaks within one group but rather get a page wrap before the group header and then the whole group on the next page. Totally simple, totally understandable, totally impossible so far.

Introducing Radar Charts as New Chart Type

radar chart in list & label 22

We'll introduce a brand new popular chart type that has been missing in List & Label until version 22: radar charts. Also known as "spider charts", "web charts" or "polar charts", they are a cool way to visualize ratios between different categories across multiple rows. It can answer questions like "which values are most similar, i.e. do we see clusters of values" and helps to find outliers at a glance.

Top-N and “Others” for Crosstabs

top n crosstab pivot dialogue
And while we're at it, let's disclose the last new feature for LL22's crosstab. You were able to design Top-N reports with the crosstab before. The way it works, you choose the required sorting for your group cells, e.g. the category name in the sample of the last post. You're then able to choose the sort order for the items (alphabetically, based on the result value, based on the displayed value).