New report tips

New custom reports are built using Microsoft® Power BI. Some tips for those building reports:

  • Become familiar with Microsoft® Power BI and its documentation

    Microsoft provides videos, online help, and other resources for Power BI. The documentation covers how to use connect to various kinds of data sources, to create different kinds of visualizations, etc. See, for example, What is Power BI? and Getting Started with Power BI. For those creating reports, see Power BI for Report Designers.

  • Become familiar with the Standard reports

    Business Edge provides multi-page Standard reports focused on Initiatives, Opportunities, Pursuits, and Tasks. Many of the pages and visualizations provide filters and slicers so that you can answer many questions very quickly. You can use these standard reports as models for any customized reports. Power BI provides easy Copy/Paste and Duplicate this Page capabilities so that you can use and reuse pieces from these reports.

  • Use the hierarchical power of the data model in Power BI reports

    You can build Power BI reports that allow you to drill down (hierarchically). See, for example, the Initiative Rollup Standard report.

  • For more advanced users, consider building your own reports.

    • You can select to Edit any of the standard reports. This effectively means that you save it to a new name. In the process, yo ucan choose to make it public (available to everyone) or private, at least until you believe that the report format is appropriate to share.

      TIP Save the report often during the report creation process to avoid a Business Edge time-out error.

    • Become familiar with the Business Edge data model. The entire data model is provided in Data Model.

    • Become familiar with the existing charts and tables. When you are editing a report, clicking on any visualization highlights the fields and filters used.

      Power BI provides icons and symbols about data types. These can help you assess what data fields to use.

      Icon Indicates
      Table
      Column/Field
      Count columns. Columns like Opportunity.OpportunityCount, Pursuit.PursuitCount, Task.TaskCount are included in the Data Model.  These column have a value of 1 for each row and can be summed up to get counts of these objects.  SUM() is a faster way to get this information versus getting unique value counts from things like OpportunityID or PusrsuitID.
       

      ListData measures are added to provide comma delimited lists of One to Many data relationships for each record.  They are grouped in the ListData folder.

      For details, see ListData.
      Hierarchical structure--such as between Initiatives and Pursuits

      CalendarDate tables are added to allow date driven reports to be sliced or displayed in different groupings.  For example, YearMonthShort is setup to have a sorting from YearMonthNumber.  This allows a report author to add YearMonthShort to an report but visually it will sort correctly based on YearMonthNumber values.

      A Year Hierarchy is added to each CalendarDate table.  This hierarchy contains Year, YearQuarter, YearMonthShort, and Date.  Use this Hierarchy for Date driven reports.  This allows users to drill down the Hierarchy levels to see more granular details.  You can remove elements of the Hierarchy once added to a report.  For example, remove Year if you want your report to display YearMonthShort with drill down to Date.

      For more details on the kinds of date tables available in the data model, see Date Tables.
      Address data

      Measure is a folder full of various Count and Revenue measures included to support different types of reports. They include, for example:

      Count

      Opened, Closed, and Created count measures allow for point in time and running total reports.

      Outcome

      Won, Lost, Declined, and NoDecision Outcome count measures allow for point in time reports.

      Estimated Value

      Estimated Value measures allow point in time and running total reports based on Open Date.

      Expected Revenue

      Expected Revenue measures allow point in time and running total reports based on Closed Date.

      For details, see Measures.

  • Power BI provides a powerful natural-language method for specifying what you want. It can provide a convenient place to start building a report by entering:

    "Which open pursuits have the most open opportunities?" "Which open opportunities have the most open tasks?" "For opportunities closed in the last 24 months, what were the outcomes?" "Which 10 practice groups have the most open pursuits?"

    To use the capability, click the Ask a Question button when authoring or customizing a report and enter your question.

  • Add labels or text where appropriate

    Power BI provides buttons for Text Box, Shapes, and Buttons for every page.

    IMPORTANT Customized nomenclature settings made in the Administrative settings of Business Edge [Label Configuration] are not persisted in the data model. This includes selections for currency format and date format.

  • Power BI Custom reports are not limited to one page

    Power BI provides multi-page reports, so the report can contain all the visualizations you think appropriate to make your point effectively. You can even Duplicate this page to insert a duplicate of an existing page when one page and its data or layout provides a convenient template for another.

  • Reports and data sets in the Insights Gallery are dynamically linked to the data and are refreshed daily

    You don't need to rerun reports to get the latest results. Your data sets, reports, and dashboards will change as opportunities, pursuits, tasks, and initiatives are updated. Build the report once and evaluate it over time. Does it provide the correct data, best visualizations, and the appropriate perspective?

  • Include Data Tables [data grids] in the report

    Add Grids to expose the data your report uses.  This allows report users to have confidence in the report.  It also allows the report user to export the data.  By default a report graph that allows "Show Records" will only show the columns on the table being aggregated.  Including a grid on the page allows you to create a data grid that has the FullList measures and some of the other columns from related tables.  This provides a full export experience for the report user.

  • Filters and slicers provide special perspectives

    Filters and Slicers allow users to focus data within the report on the areas they are interested in.  Page and Report filters allow more report screen real-estate as well as provide counts of the elements filtered.  In the Opportunity Report, there are numerous ways to filter in-progress opportunities: by practice group, industry, opportunity type, work type, and stage. Also by lead, target company, jurisdiction, and client type. Date ranges or slicers provide a quick way for users to focus in on the specific date ranges they are interested in.

  • Exporting and printing data

    Each visualization in a Power BI report has more options available from selections [when you mouse over the top right corner of the canvas]—. Select More Options > Export Data. Power BI gives you options in terms of the data to be exported to Excel or to .csv formats.

 

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