Custom summary report based on a filtered list?

Hi

I'm sure QB can do this, but I've not quite got there yet. Some help would be great.

I've got a table of Staff related twice (actually five times, but twice should be enough for an example) to a table of Activities.  Each staff takes a different role in the activity, for example, "initial contact," "lead development." If I've set up my table rules right, those two roles will never be done by the same person.  I want to produce a report based on the list of potential staff how many activities they are doing, filtered by an 'ask the user' date.

Thus I might have Staff A, B, C, D, E, and F.   I can filter Staff on another field in that table to exclude D (or D and G, and H, and...).  Then I would want to see something like this showing number of activities:

Staff           Activity type IC       Activity type LD
A                   32                               15
B                   0                               23
C                   0                               0
E                    14                                0
F                    27                               14

I've actually been able to do this fairly nicely by using a summary field in the Staff table and then showing a report based on this staff table with the appropriate columns and also do summation columns easily (like A above would have 47).  But, this approach ensures that an administrator needs to set up the report with set periods (like this quarter or last quarter, etc), whereas the report I'm after could be setup to ask the user which dates he would like to see.  In this case it would most likely be a manager.

I'm new at this, but this is one of the reports I had to produce regularly based on our excel sheet and it was a several hour pain to do every couple of months. It'd be great to have this automated.

Thanks for any input.
Dave

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David Halter
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