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Deleting a Display Variant

You may very well accumulate a collection of display variants over time as you use the system and your job function changes. You should "clean house" on occasion and get rid of out-of-date variants by following this next procedure.

Procedure: Deleting a Display Variant

Step 1.

Follow the menu path Settings > Layout > Administration or Manage or Management (Figure 15.22).

Figure 15.22. Menu path for deleting a display variant.

Step 2.

The Layout: Management screen appears with a list of available display variants. Each variant has a selection box to its left (Figure 15.23A).

Select a variant by clicking its selection box.
Click the Delete button (B) in the application toolbar.

Figure 15.23. Select the display variant to delete (A), click the Delete button (B), then click the Save button (C) to return to the output screen.

3. The display variant is erased from the list.

Click the Save button (C) to record your changes and return to the output screen, where confirmation of your action appears in the status bar (Figure 15.24).

Figure 15.24. Confirmation that you deleted a display variant appears in the status bar of the output screen.

Working With Display Variants on Other Screens

We described the various procedures for using display variants on the output screens of list-display transactions throughout this lesson. However, you can also apply the same procedures to the line-item tables that you will find on the initial and output screens of other transactions.

For example, the initial screen for the ME51N transaction , which creates requisitions for materials and services, contains a line-item table (A) for entering data about those requisitions (Figure 15.25). The output screen for the ME53N transaction, which displays requisition data, contains this same table in a read-only format. Each line of these tables contains data for one requisitioned material item or service, which are entered in a long series of columns . To see all these data, you must scroll horizontally along the length of the table.

Figure 15.25. The initial screen for creating a requisition contains a line-item table. You can create and work with variants for this table with the commands of the Layout Settings button (B).

However, it is possible to create a display variant for this table with fewer columns. The procedure begins at the Layout Settings button (B) in the application toolbar of the table. Click this button to display a list of variant- related commands, then follow the same procedures that we offered in the earlier part of this lesson.

Lesson 16. Exporting Line-item Reports to Microsoft Excel and Word

The previous lessons described the procedures for customizing line-item reports with various tools that are available in SAP. But thanks to a strategic alliance between SAP and Microsoft, it is also possible to convert SAP line-item reports into Excel spreadsheets and Word documents (where you can then use the tools of these powerful applications to customize them) or into unformatted data (which can easily be pasted into an e-mail message).

There are two classes of methods for exporting SAP line-item reports to these applications. For the lack of better names , we call them front-door exports and back-door exports .

Front-door exports use menu paths and tool buttons in the application toolbars of output screens to automatically convert reports into fully formatted Excel spreadsheets and Word documents.
Back-door exports simply "dump" raw unformatted SAP data into an external storage location, such as the hard drive on your personal computer. You must then convert them into Microsoft spreadsheets and documents by executing several additional steps.

This lesson describes the procedures for exporting SAP line-item reports to these applications, and specifically into MS Excel . We limit this discussion to MS Excel for three reasons.

Converting SAP line-item reports into MS Excel spreadsheets is by far the most common and obvious use of the export tool, and some output screens are set up exclusively for this purpose.
SAP line-item reports are converted into tables when they are exported into MS Word. Excel is the better tool for working with tables.
The procedures for exporting SAP reports to MS Word are exactly the same as those for exporting them to MS Excel .

However, we also make mention of the means of exporting SAP reports to MS Word whenever it is appropriate.

We should also note that we only describe the procedures for exporting SAP line-item reports to Excel in this lesson. We do not describe the procedures for customizing them once they arrive there: You will have to buy another book to learn about that!

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Mazzullo J., Wheatley P.

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