Counting products

[mizz_s]

Hi
this might seem a daft question but other than opening every section and subsection and counting manually down the tree, or exporting to an excell document, is there a way of finding out how many products there are in a catalog?
I have run & previewed a catalog summary & catalog detail report thinking there may be a totals page but I couldn't see one. Was I looking in the wrong place?

cheers

[jont]

Hi Sally, this has been covered before - so a search on product count including http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=12849 amongst others

[mizz_s]

Hi
Cheers for that - I did do a quick search earlier, the results I got were about setting up a variable to display numbers of items for sale- not quite what I had in mind.

I just thought there was something in a report somewhere that I could quickly look at. For no other reason than to satisfy my curiosity for how many items there were for sale!

thanks again

[completerookie]

It may not be a perfect method, but if you are happy with looking inside the access database, I cannot be reasponsible if you SAVE the database by mistake so follow instructions carefully

• open up ActinicCatalog.mdb
• click on the Tables tab on the left
• find the table called Product
• scroll to the right looking for a column called sOriginalProdRef
• click on one of the cells in this column
• right click and choose Sort Ascending
• scroll down until you find the FIRST entry with something in it in this column
• click in the empty cell ABOVE that first entry
• look down at the bottom of the table and you will see something like "Record 830 of 955"
• close the database DO NOT SAVE any settings

the number of records in the table shows the total number of items in your table including hidden and duplicates - so in my example I have 830 normal entries and 955 total entries and (955-830) 125 hidden entries

this particular colummn is the one that points to the master item when you create a duplicate
any entry in that column indicates it was a duplicate and so if you click on the last empty entry, you get the number of records that are TRUE components

some simple maths gives you the number of true components, duplicates etc

NOTHING in this excercise shows you options or hidden items just the number of "master items"

please do NOT save the database when you close it, just leave everything as you found it.

hope its helpful.
perhaps other useful columns can be suggested.

kev

[mizz_s]

Cheers Kev

If I'm feeling brave I will have a go.

Feels as though its going to be like poking a wasps nest with a stick!

I am going to ask the nice developers in the wish list deptartment to add a product total section in the summary report.

[chris ashdown]

Sally

Just make a copy of the database and move it out of the way to say your documents file and use that to play with, and you do not have to worry as the original is safe and sound

[mizz_s]

Good idea Chris- that makes sense.

I may well have a play later this afternoon if time permits.

[completerookie]

sorry, totally forgot to suggest doing the work on a copy, but as always, take precautions !