The only thing you'll want to do before heading for the Reports view is to create a Lookup of contacts specific to your reports. For example, if you want to run the Source of Referrals report to find out how all your top customers found out about you in the first place, you'll want to create a Lookup for Top Customers.

The ACT! Report will include only those contacts that are included as part of your current lookup. In addition, as you run a report you can filter the contents of that report. For example, you might create a lookup of all of your customers, and then filter your report to include only notes that you've added about those customers in the last 30 days.

You can learn about the various filtering options in the next chapter. You can permanently alter the filtering options in a report from the Report Designer, which we'll discuss later in this book. For example, you may always want to run one of the Opportunity reports for the prior month, or save your pipeline as a PDF file.