Distibutable Reporting Tool

[litrelord]

Hi,

For those of you that distribute reports either around your company or externally can I ask what programs you use to do this. We currently use crystal reports to access data from sql server then put this data into excel to create charts etc and send it out.

This works OK and we've been doing it for long enough now that we've ironed out most of the problems but what I'd prefer is to be able to send out something that's a lot more dynamic. If we could sen out a file which showed the basic data but also allowed people to choose which data to display and how to display it without them having to learn how to use excel properly or us having to create a further page in the report then that would be fantastic.

I toyed with the idea of a macro enriched excel file but then I'd be the only person who could update any of the code if we wanted to make changes. I figure there must be a perfect solution out there I just can't seem to find one. Having some kind of extranet could work but the cost involved in setting it up doesn't make it feasible (we've done it before and it's too much to invest for some of the clients we have).

Any ideas?

Nick

 

[adam_neb]

Pivot Tables are helpful to allow the user to change report parameters on the fly and allow them to drill down to an area of interest.

Charts linked to auto-filtered rows are useful to give a visual represenation of data.

Both options require a bit more than basic knowlege of Excel, but in both cases it should be easy to teach....

 

[litrelord]

I hadn't considered the charts using autofiltered data. That might help in the meantime at least to make the data more meaningful.

Pivot tables i'm not getting into as they're just not intuitive enough. I need this to be completely obvious to someone who picks it up for the first time. otherwise i've changed my job from a report writer into a support coordinator.

Good ideas though, thanks Adam.

 

[mrhartley]

I use pivot tables all the time to present data but I also agree that they are not intuitive enough. I still have end users not understanding how to manipulate the data even though it seems clear how to do so. I am not an IT trainer and nor should I be and I don't want dozens of people calling me asking how to select just 'my bits of information ' blah blah blah. I even add some text on my sheets explaining how to use the help tool to find some help on Pivot tables but they seem to lazy to bother.

Infact for one of our projects, we put the data into Access and had someone design a bunch of reporting forms so the end users could just click a button and print what they wanted. This of course increases development costs and everyone needs MS Access and in the long run support is no easier if Access ever goes wrong.

However Adam, on here somewhere I have seen an advert for some dashboards. It seems that it will take your data and present it in a fashion that could be what your looking for.

I cannot say where you get them or how they work as I have not yet tried but I was an ad that appeared on this web site.

Regards
Mark

 

[RichardS]

I used to email budget reports to all department heads. This became a bit old and stale, and we wanted a way of providing "live" data to managers desktops. Now we use a system developed here in Victoria called PowerBudget. Originally developed to assist in establishing budgets, it provides us with the ability to deleiver financial, payroll and potentially any other data to the managers desktop. They then have the option of viewing the data how they want to, remeove and add columns, look at summary level or detailed data etc. I suppose you'd call it an Executive Information System.

It then comes down to how much you want to spend. When researching for potential systems, I had a range of costs from over $100k to install and $20k p.a. support, down to $20k install and $6k p.a. support. We're a $40 million business, so the $6k p.a. per dataset is not unreasonable.

Richard

 

[Kenright]

We use an Oracle database; and one of the tools used to create reports is Discoverer. As the new Reports Analyst here, I am learning everyday how to further utilize this reporting tool. Basically it allows a user to create a report with whatever criteria they desire. Discoverer can be "scheduled" to run reports at a specific time, and it's output can be set for Excel, text tab-del, .csv files, etc. I merely pick up the reports from the assigned drive and folder, run a macro on them to clean them up, and email them out to department heads and outside clients. Granted, the reports need to be further refined to eliminate the running of the macros; I was only recently hired and it is one of the tasks that myself and the head of IT are looking at accomplishing. But this is easily done; the ability to customize in Discoverer is quite large.