Summary (crosstab) reports are a special kind of report. They summarize records of various types in a grid format. You define the columns and rows along with the values to be summarized, then VSys totals the values.
Summary/crosstab reports are exported to Excel rather than printed. This affords you much more flexibility in how you present the data rather than being restricted to how VSys would do it automatically.
You'll regularly use calculated fields here to distill the information down. Rather than using the date of an assignment, for example, you're more likely to want the month, quarter or year in order to have columns and rows that make sense.
Use the sixteen built-in sample reports: Account Records by Quarter; Active Status Transitions Summary; Hours summary for period by volunteer; Hours summary monthly by location, job group and job; Hours summary monthly by volunteer; Hours summary monthly by volunteer type; Hours summary quarterly by volunteer; Hours summary quarterly by volunteer type; Hours summary yearly by location, job group and job; Hours summary yearly by volunteer; Hours summary yearly by volunteer type; Person Type Transitions Summary; Survey Summaries; Unique volunteers with hours by job, job group and year; Unique volunteers with hours by location, job group, job and year and Volunteer Counts by Active Status and Date Started as examples on how these reports work and what you can get from them.