Everything about reporting tools

What is a Reporting Tool?

Reporting tools allow you to extract and present data in charts, tables, and other visualizations so users can find useful information. It can also allow you to build paginated reports ideal for printing. A reporting tool is typically an application within a business intelligence software suite.

Reports can vary in their interactivity. Static reports cannot be changed by the end users while interactive reports allow you to navigate the report through various hierarchies and visualization elements. Interactive reports allow you to drill down through various levels of the data at the click of a button. They also allow you to navigate, sort, filter and view the data for your specific needs.

What is the Goal of a Reporting Tool?

The purpose of reporting tools and business intelligence tools are to translate data into actionable information.

Reporting should fit within your strategic business goals in order to be useful. There are also many use cases for reporting tools from managing performance data to allowing your customers to leverage reporting of their own data.

The Basics of Reporting

Learn More About FineReport Reporting Capabilities.

Now that you understand the goal of a reporting tool and what a reporting tool does, let’s take a look at the larger purpose of reporting.

Reporting is commonly an early step in data processing that achieves the goal of delivering interactive, actionable information. Interactivity in the form of drill down, sort, filter, and other features allow you to further explore your data for the best insights. Actionable information empowers you with the knowledge to make better business decisions.

Reporting for Business Intelligence

Reporting, in the context of business intelligence, is one of the base components and, as mentioned, is functionally involved in the early stages of analysis. Mainly, reporting plays the role of visualizing data. It does so by utilizing a number of different components from charts, graphs, tables, as well other widgets. A report can be made up of one of these component parts, or many of these component parts. These component visualizations are used to represent data in different ways, but all are used for the purpose of presenting information in an accurate and usable way to end users.

Visualization and Reporting

As previously referenced, today’s visualizations contain many different ways to interact and manipulate data. The increased levels of interactivity, which have evolved as business needs have, means that the way in which users interact with reports has changed. What used to only be simple visualizations of data, are now being used more and more for the purposes of data discovery, and in some cases full­fledged data analysis.

This means that the ability to slice and dice and drill down/through data, utilize formulas, and even some base level data modeling is now being moved from the hands of dedicated data scientists and analysts to the hands of non­technical decision makers. With this added functionality, the ability to make more objective, data­driven decisions is becoming easier an easier.

Self­-Service Reporting

The emergence of self­service or ad hoc reporting capabilities has also driven the levels of interactivity even further by giving the power to create and edit reports directly to decision makers, further empowering them to drive businesses forward while decreasing the workload on developers and report developers.

Enterprise Web Reporting

Undoubtedly, the development of reports has become a very important part of enterprise­ program development. Enterprise­ reports help to achieve significant improvements in business intelligence and knowledge management.

The financial situation of enterprises can be different through data extraction, data conversion, and data loading. The data is placed in the data warehouse, then the reporting tool is used to handle the data and generate the report, and finally the content is sent by email or printed. However, reports are complex, flexible, and sometimes not easy to understand. For this reason, many organizations have adopted the design of web report plug­ins to meet different design habits and reporting needs of users.

The Web is a new Internet method. It generally promotes information exchange and collaboration between people on the Internet through Web Applications. Its model is more user­centric. The earliest concepts of the Web include static HTML pages that are frequently updated. The success of the com era relies on a more dynamic Web (referred to as “Web 1.5”), in which CMS (Content Management System) can generate dynamic HTML pages from an everchanging content database. Web reports have various advantages and flexible and multiple push methods. In simple terms, they are reports that allow users to view, edit, save and export online.

As technology changes, the ability to present and output data in different ways is also growing. Enterprise­ Web tools such as FineReport now offer many different ways to output data for further analysis or sharing. Next, let me talk about some common output methods.

How does the Reporting Tool Work?

Business Intelligence developers and report writers use reporting tools (such as Finereport Designer) to specify data sources, display formats, visualize data, query with parameter and so on.

For example, FineReport server is mainly used to read and parse the template created by the designer, and convert the template into an html page, so that users can view, modify and print data through browsers such as IE and Firefox. At the same time, a powerful caching mechanism and clustering mechanism are built in, which supports large data volume calculations and concurrent processing of a large number of users, and innovatively adopts flash technology, which perfectly supports zero-client accurate printing.

Why Use FineReport for Data Analysis?

FineReport is the leading enterprise web publishing tool. The FineReport report designer interface is similar to Excel. Users who are familiar with Excel do not need any additional learning costs. Generally, users can quickly grasp the use of the designer after reading the FineReport report help document. The report design interface is simple and easy to use, and end users who don’t understand the technology can also learn and use it to create report templates. In addition, by using the enterprise reporting tool, users can turn the business model and data analysis of the enterprise into a practical and operational information system. You can use the functions of report presentation, report, summary, statistical analysis, printout and other functions to build a lightweight enterprise reporting platform. In particular, using mainstream data two-way expansion, multi-source sharding, pure drag and other methods for report design makes designers not need to master complex code writing skills. You can also design a report in line with business logic at any time, to meet the needs of report users and reduce the operating costs of the enterprise.

Benefits of Using FineReport

Here are some additional benefits of using FineReport to embed reports into your application.

A simple drag-and-drop operation mode

1. One-click connection to the data source

2. Excel-like drag-and-drop mode

3. Quickly create a web report without additional learning or code knowledge.

Flexible data reporting design

1. General Report: for traditional lattice complex report

2. Aggregate Report: for irregular large report

3. Decision Making Report: for making dashboard

Three unique types of reports allow you to design reports of various functional styles to meet the needs of various data analysis scenarios.

Cool visualization and interaction

1. 15 types of Self-developed charts

2. More than 50 chart styles

3. Smooth dynamic interactions and personalized chart configurations create a variety of cool visualizations.

Powerful data entry

1. Multi-stage Reporting

2. Offline Data Entry

3. Page-break Data Entry

4. Multi-sheet Data Entry

5. Batch import of Excel

Enterprise-class report management platform

1. Unified management of users, data, reports and permissions with the help of FineReport’s data decision system.

2. An enterprise-level reporting platform to complete data centralized management.

   Perfect multi-screen application

3. Enterprise-wide data visualization management.

4. FineReport provides a one-stop solution for PC, mobile and large screen.

Very short implementation period

1. Pure Java construction, easy to deploy in multiple ways

2. Flexible integration and invocation with other systems

3. Provide performance and risk control solutions

4. Easy to operate and maintain

Original source: http://www.finereport.com/en/reporting-tools/reporting-tools-everything-you-need-to-know.html