From the course: Introduction to Career Skills in Data Analytics

Creating reports to visualize your data over pages

From the course: Introduction to Career Skills in Data Analytics

Creating reports to visualize your data over pages

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- [Instructor] Not all data is best consumed using a dashboard. Yes, dashboards provide valuable capabilities, but some reports can be valuable in different formats. When we have reports that have line items and that is the type of display this will produce several pages and a dashboard representation of that data may not be the most user friendly. There are tools like Power BI Report Builder that allow us to build what are called paginated reports. Paginated reports allow you to connect to data, not unlike dashboards. In fact, before the popularity of the dashboard most of the reports were paginated reports. Although some people think they are a thing of the past I think it's important to remember what determines the style of your report is the need for how that data is best visualized and how it's going to be consumed. If it's going to be delivered via PDF, or even printed for a meeting. In our role we've been asked to update an existing report that's currently a line item report and is many, many pages long. This report would simply benefit from some groups and summaries. Let's go to Report Builder and redesign this sales order meeting records report. This report is connected to AdventureWorks 2019, which is a popular sample report. And I have a data set here called sales records. And when I expand that, I see all of the fields that are available to me. But if I want to look at the underlying query I can right click and go to query. This lets me look at the different fields that are being used in the actual report. It'll also let me take a look at the relationships, which again, multiple tables means I need relationships. And it shows me the join type, which is inner. Now there are some fields that I need that are not in the data set. I can go right click and go to the data set properties. And this lets me work with the individual fields. I can go in and add a calculation, which I've already done here for order date. Let's go take a look at that function. This actually allows me to format that order date value in a date format that's a short date, which is perfect. I'll go ahead and click okay. Click okay again. This report does provide valuable information, but again, that multiple lines is not effective for the meeting. So we're going to replace it with the matrix. And even though we'll have line items, we'll just have fewer, and it will become more meaningful for the meeting. The matrix is just like a pivot in Excel. It has rows, columns, and summary values. So we want to look at a simple subtotal for the sales people for each product. So we'll go to insert, choose matrix, we'll click on insert matrix and then we can click in the body of our report. We'll drag name for product name to the rows. We'll put the last name of our salesperson in the columns and then we'll use the total due for our summary field. In Report Builder we build in the design view, but to see the data we have to run the report. I'll choose run. Now this report actually shows the high level subtotal for each salesperson across the top, and then also shows each breakdown of each product down the left hand side. We can go to the very last page and see that we went from 3,000 plus pages to 6 pages. Fantastic. Let's go back to the design view. We can make a few adjustments. Want to increase our product there, a little bit wider. Let's go preview it again. Definitely getting a little bit better. We'll go to our page set up. Because it's wide we'll make it landscape. We definitely want to adjust our margins to be smaller. And then when we're ready, we can export our report into various formats. But we can also publish these reports. Paginated reports can provide valuable reporting when your data expands over many pages. And remember it can easily be published, PDF'd, or printed.

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