(Promoted from the documentation: some highlights of popular questions about Salsa reports, many from our recent trainings, answered by Chelsea the support Jedi.)

Q: How do I find all donations (regardless of amount) for those donors who have given $500 or more at least once.

A: For this type of report, you'll want to select at least the Donation table, and also the Supporter table if you need information such as the Supporter's address. From there, I'd recommend selecting the supporter key and amount field (at least) from the column options, with conditions for Result = 0 and amount greater than 500. You can group by the supporter key value and add a group concat function on the amount field to return a list of all transactions greater than $500.

Q: What's the quickest and easiest way to see donation results from a specific email blast?

A: We use the email blast keys as tags to indicate conversion rates. If you create an aggregate report on Donations, you can select the columns that you need and then use the Filter by Tag option to filter your results to only those donation records that are tagged with a tag equal to the email blast key.

Q: Can you show us the format for the "start at this time" field?

A: When scheduling a blast to send to yourself (or using any date field in Salsa), you'll want to format the date like 2009-06-13 14:00.

Q: Can you run a report on supporter data like date created, but restrict it to only members of one group?

A: You can indeed. Under the first step of the report builder, you can use the Advanced Object Chooser to select these tables: Groups, Supporter Groups, Supporter and Supporter Custom if you need this as well. To remind you of the column selection then, you can select the Date Created field from the Supporter record and add a function of Month and check the Group by box, then add a count of the Supporter table's supporter key field, making sure to change the Label of the field so that it doesn't show up as a hyperlink but as a number.

(Note: Or, turn the group into a tag and simply filter by tag. -ed.)

Q: What is roll-up?

A: From our documentation: "When checked, a report with rollup will also display a sum total of aggregated sums as the last line of the report - for instance, in a count of people signing a petition month by month, the last line of a "rollup" report will show the total number of all people who have taken that action."

My coworker Jason also really likes to use this for donation reports. There's a bit more about it here.

Q: Is there printed documentation on this?

A: The reports documentation home page is at: http://salsacommons.org/o/8001/p/salsa/commons/package/?packageId=salsa.report.common  Through the Full Documentation, there's a link to a summary of commonly-used tables which will hopefully help with getting started on selecting your own tables: http://salsacommons.org/o/8001/p/salsa/web/wiki/public/?reference=Brief%20table%20summary

Q: if you upload a database (.txt) file can you run a report just on that database?

A: If you would like to view only supporters created from a particular file import, you can set the conditions for Supporter Source Details equal to the file name of the import. Optionally, you can also group or tag the records sat the time of import for easier retrieval.

Q: Please send an email to describe how to set the RESULT field on donation reports.

A: "RESULT = 0" indicates valid online transactions.  If you also have manually-entered transactions that you would like to see in your report results, I'd recommend using "RESULT is in list 0,-1" and adding a condition for "Transaction Type not like %Test%".

Q: Can you set the transaction date function to do "previous 30 days" so that it will consider the current date when running the report so you don't have to edit the report each time?

A: There are a couple options that are similar to this, including "In this month," "In the last week," "In the last 24 hours," "In the past," and "In the future" - These can be selected from the Function menu under the Operations or Function column on the Conditions tab. The report can also be set to accept any arbitrary user date or date range each time it is run.

Q: What's the difference between the conditions tab and the filter tab?

A: Anne gets credit for this succinct note: Conditions let you ask the database for info and then filters tell the report to show you a specified subset of the data that meet the conditions.  This, I thought was quite well put, but again, please ask if you need clarification.

Q: Can you talk about when and why the word "KEY" should be removed from some the fields before you actually run the report?

A: If you leave the default label as (for example) supporter.supporter_KEY, the end results will display as a link to the individual supporter record from the report window.

If you don't want the results to appear as a link, especially in a case where, for example, you'd want to display the actual count of supporter keys instead of a link to a single key, you'll want to rename the field with your own label.