Chemstation printing / quantitating - Newbie problem

[ryan.edwardson]

Hello

Apologies for posting a what might be a fairly obvious problem to some but we're currently having a few issues with our GC-MSs. I'm an analyst and have read through the manual but I wasn't around when our methods and macros were constructed and I'm a bit confused going in at the deep end!

My question is - Does chemstation automatically print out a basic report for every sample that is run? If so, how can we stop this occurring? Currently when we inject anything that is run as a 'blank' (assigned by 'type' on the sequence) we seem to get a very basic print out report of a chromatogram with the sample info at the top. This is in addition to our own custom analysis macros being run - which produce a completely different report. There is no identification of any peaks listed on the print out, just the chromatogram.

Our machines only appear to be doing this when the 'blank' is originally run. If I go to data analysis and re-run the method, it doesn't print out the report again which is confusing me slightly. Surely it should be doing the same thing each time it runs the method?

To our knowledge this hasn't always been the case so we must be able to stop it from doing it somehow!

Any thoughts or musings on our situation are welcome!

[James_Ball]

When you go to the Run Sequence window, are there any entries in the Pre-Seq Macro/Command or Post-Seq Macro/Command lines?

Anything in these boxes will cause a macro to run when you run a Sequence.

Also if you use the Method menu and go to Edit Entire Method, check the Data Analysis box and click through until you find Select Reports window, and see if you have any reports selected to run there. That is another place that automatic reports can be run from.

I normally run all of my injections as Samples so I don't know if Blanks have a special report or not by default.

[ryan.edwardson]

Thanks James, I know that screen well! I figured I had been playing about in the right area but wasn't quite sure.

Does the 'custom report' box need to be ticked for it to run the custom analysis macros we have written - I would assume that it does?

[James_Ball]

I haven't used the custom reports there but I would assume if you check the box there it will run automatically as the samples run. I always ran them from the data analysis program after I had reviewed the samples. In data analysis there is a menu item there for custom reports so you can edit a report template, generate report, and update a custom database. Back when I used the custom database if I made any corrections in data analysis it would tend to put duplicate results in the data base if I made changes in the review process so I just turned off running them with the sample sequence.

[ryan.edwardson]

Thanks James

One of the machines didn't have the custom report button ticked and ran the macros we installed so I am wondering whether or not this is the issue.

From what I understand (and please correct me if I am wrong - the manual didn't help too much in this regard) when a sample runs using a method it will run through all of the reports selected on the 'select reports' screen for that method and THEN run any post-run macros we have assigned to that method?

The way I originally saw it was you had to select custom report to run the 'custom macro' but I'm not sure whether that is actually correct or not now...

This may be the cause of many other issues. I'll do some playing about with it and let you know!