You use symbols to allocate data from R/3 Product Safety and other R/3 components to certain positions in your Winword document. Symbols contain key information that the R/3 System uses to access the R/3 substance database or other R/3 tables automatically and to output the corresponding values on the substance report.

Various symbols are contained in the IMG activity Check and define report symbols in Customizing for Product Safety.

The following symbol types are used as placeholders for data in document templates, for instance:

You can allocate the symbols to substance characteristic categories and their characteristics on the detail screen of the Customizing table. On this screen, you can also maintain the allocation of symbols to table fields.

When you adjust the master data, the system automatically generates symbols for the following IMG activities:

• For the entries in IMG activity Specify R/3 tables for report symbol generation. You can specify the table fields for which you want to generate symbols.
• For all defined substance characteristic categories and characteristics in IMG activity Specify substance characteristic categories.

If you have created new substance characteristic categories and characteristics and want to use these in your reports, you need to adjust the master data again to generate the relevant symbols.

The generated symbol keys have a unique nomenclature.