How to display and sort multiple product names in opportunity list view in ACT2007!?

[grietd]

As a small fundraising consulting business owner, I have tried to tailor the opportunity function in ACT! 2007 for my specific business needs with limited success. 

In “Opportunity list” view, I would like to see: Company name, contact, product names!, opp. name, assoc. with, open date, stage (and ideally state and city)

Problem 1: I want to see different products names all at once in opportunity list view. Company 1 has product name X,Y and Z.  It is very important that I can see at a glance Company 1 has X-Y-Z vs. Company 2 has W-X-Z, while at the same time understanding with whom they are associated and the contact person....

Problem 2: In opportunity list view, I do not see capability of sorting all opportunities within one stage by the various "product name" (s) alphabetically.

What are my alternatives?

If I export "opportunity list view" columns to Excel, I do not see multiple products per company, thus Excel only displays first product name of drop down menu and I cannot seem to sort according to 2nd or 3rd product name in Excel.

Could I add a "product name" column to the "look up contact view"? But I also would need to keep the "associated with"  column.

Instead of using the product field, could I add an interest field to the opportunity view? If so, can I sort by 2nd or 3rd interest, or see all interests at once.

What I would like is the view as if I use "user" field of the contact view, where I can make a drop down menu, and see different choices at one. – Can I add this user Field and drop down menu (from the contact view) in the opportunity list view?

I tried using queries but that did not seem to work well either.

[Roy_Laudenslager]

The products are stored in a separate table linked to the opportunities that way you can have the one-to-many relationship between the opportunities and the products. The opportunity list view is a flat file view and there isn't any way to display multiple products for a single opportunity. The same is true of Excel. A report can be made to show multiple products for each opportunity.

[mike@ddauto.com]

This is my problem exactly.  The export function works great except that I cannot divide my pipeline by product.  I need to be able to see how much of each product I am forecasting for each month.  The only solution I have found is to add a new opportunity for each client for each product but this is a poor solution at best.  There must be an answer for this basic issue.

[Roy_Laudenslager]

Have you tried the Opportunities by Product report?

[mike@ddauto.com]

Is it possible to create the ‘flat file view’ and export to excel for a single product and filter out the others.  I want t pivot table for a single product so that I can forecast sales of only that product.  Right now all I can get is total sales for all products combined which is almost usefull but not quite.

[mike@ddauto.com]

The Opportunities by Product report does not give you any Product per Customer data.  The only quantities are total for the report period.  I could run the report once for each month I wanted to report and then repeat the process for each product.  This seems very cumbersome for basic data.

[Roy_Laudenslager]

Check the Opportunities by Product report, that may help.

[Roy_Laudenslager]

What version of ACT! was your database created on and what version are you running now? I believe this report was updated around ACT! 2007 or 2008 but if you database was created with an earlier version then you don't have the latest version of the report. Accumulation of additional totals, for example product per customer but that would need to be done using VB scripting. I've not done so with this particular report but I've done similar things with other reports. Send me a private message if you want to discuss it further.

[mike@ddauto.com]

Month Product A  Product B
Jan      $250          $255
Feb     $125           $128
Mar     $325           $332
Apr      $275           $281
May     $190          $194
Jun      $250          $255
Jul       $125           $128

This is what I am talking about.  It seems like very useful information to me.  If your costs and margins are different for each product it would seem that this is critical information which is captured within ACT but it cannot be easily reported out of ACT at least as far as I can see.  I am running ACT 2005 Premium for Workgroups.  I love ACT but this is killing me.  Every month we need to see this data per product and the process to report is very time consuming.  Help Please!! 

[Roy_Laudenslager]

I could do that by adding VB scripting to the Opportunities by Product type of report on a pre-specified set of products but it would not be a generic report. On the other hand, I could use VB scripting to add month breakouts for a maximum of 12 months for each separate product and and a by month breakout of grand totals for all products. That would be a generic report and would not depend on a specified product list.