How can we alter SpectrAA software results report output layout and fields?

Hi fellow AA users!

I was wondering if anyone could help me with formatting of SpectrAA reporting?

Attached are two files, one is the report we get when we print to PDF, the other is how we'd ideally like to get our results formatted.

The software itself has very limited reporting controls, and nothing that can control the field labels or layout. The standard report is almost impossible to follow, with unlabelled data points and tab characters all over the place. It looks like the report is the same format from when it was Varian software and has a very 90's/00's feel to it.

The data being reported is held within the SpectrAA SQL database. and you can see at the head of the report, SQLEXPRESS is described in the worksheet.

I presume that on some fundamental level, there is a report/query being generated to pull the data from the database and this then yields the reported results.

Does anyone know where that default report template is on the SQL database (or anywhere else) so we can modify it to be properly structured? 

We use the results from our AA as part of clinical patient monitoring and recent audits have had many findings on the poor layout and unstructured nature of the results and we need to address this.

All help/advice gratefully received.

Best wishes,

Phil

  • Hello,

    Apologies for your frustrations. The reporting in SpectrAA definitely has room to improve. You can access reporting settings in Window->Reports->Settings in SpectrAA. From here you can select what you want to include or not include in the report, and for further details on this page, you can hit "F1" to pull up the help for the report settings. Other options would be to export the data to a LIMS system and generate a report from there. Hope this helps and have a great day

  • Hi John, 

    Thanks a lot for the response, really appreciate it.

    Unfortunately (as you probably already know) the settings you mention don't permit any control over the layout of the report, so include/don't include isn't enough for me to fix the issues we have. We don't have a LIMS system (and even if we did, we'd have to do a 100% data verification between systems for each analysis as it the results of our analysis are used to alter chemotherapy doses for babies in their first few days of life)

    If there is a way to get 'under the hood' of the reporting template that would be super awesome (but i appreciate this might not be the case)

    It does seem however that Agilent have made no real improvements to the software since the Varian version, which is quite disappointing.

    Best wishes

    Phil

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