Why we need reporting tools?

You can’t deny the fact that almost every position in the company is inseparable from reports.

If you are a report producer, your job is to extract appropriate data and make reports according to key indicators;

If you are a business staff, the basic components of your work are model + indicator + report +data visualization;

If you are an operation and maintenance staff, your job is to ensure that the company’s core reports are released on time.

Reports can help maintain the company’s normal production and operation. Leaders pay attention to the development of the company. They need to see the business logic from the reports. Analysts pay attention to problems, they need to find changes in the reports. The financial staff pays attention to income and profits, they need to conduct financial analysis and marketing from reports.

In reality, business people often do not obtain information and knowledge through the use of report analysis tools. Reports + Excel + PowerPoint still seem to be the mainstream.

Reports are so important that they are relevant to almost everyone in the business, but making a report is easy, but making a good report is difficult.

What do you use for reporting? This is a difficult problem. I believe that most or 90% of people are using Excel. It is simple, convenient, and basically installed on every computer. It is not difficult to learn, but what is the report made in Excel?

From  blogspot.com

Every time I see such a report, I always feel that I can’t find the point, and it is difficult to automate excel reports. Of course, advanced Excel reports can also be made like this.

From Neil Patel

Excel is indeed a good reporting tool, and the pivot table function is very easy to use, but it also has two fatal disadvantages:

1. The amount of enterprise data is getting larger and larger, when Excel faces a large amount of data, the corresponding time is too long or it cannot respond
2. There are relatively few types of charts for data visualization in Excel. Only column charts, bubble charts, and area maps are available. At present, the common needs in the field of big data are not in the optional range. The available themes are also Microsoft classics. There appears to be some “visual fatigue”.

Below I will introduce you to a “moving” reporting tool: FineReport, the personal version is completely free, and it supports a variety of chart types, you can download the trial here.

The picture above is a dashboard made by FineReport, which contains a variety of dynamic charts and data maps.

Dynamic reports not only look more beautiful, but more importantly, they can view the latest data in real time, display business analysis results more intuitively, and greatly improve work efficiency and decision accuracy.

How to implement a dynamic report with a reporting tool?

Steps are as follows:

1. Choose a reporting tool you like(here I choose FineReport ), use a template, and import data

After downloading, select the DB Query, you can find the data you want to import, rely on the cell expansion and the relationship between the parent-child cells to achieve the template effect, and drag the data into the cell, as shown below:

2.Define parameters

After the data is imported, we need to set a parameter to query different values through the parameter. In FineReport, you can directly select it through “Template-Parameter”. For example, I set the parameter name to “region” and the default value is “east-china”, as follows:

3.Parameter filtering settings

After setting the parameters, all the data will still be displayed without filtering, so you need to set the parameter filtering of the cells, you can follow “Cell Element-Filter condition” on the right:

4.Widget settings

After the parameter filtering is completed, a widget capable of storing parameter selection is required. In this report, a drop-down box is selected, as follows:

5.Report preview

Here, a dynamic report is basically completed, you can click preview to view:

6. Aggregated report design

It is especially for large irregular reports. It is suitable for a report in which multiple independent modules are displayed in a template, and several report blocks are combined together for a complex report.

7. Decision report design

Decision reports are also called dashboards, which are data visualization reports stitched together by various charts. By dragging and dropping the charts, the prepared dashboard can be adapted to the size of the screen, or can be made into a report on the mobile phone. In the end, you can achieve a dashboard of visual data as shown below.

Also, FineReport has powerful data map functions.

Conclusion

FineReport, as a professional reports software, not only can greatly reduce the time required for related staff to generate reports, but also can support business operations, improve work efficiency and synergy, reduce staff training costs, and provide effective support and assistance for business decisions. In this respect, FineReport is better than Excel.

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