[thelist] Best Practices For Online Report Formatting
Burhan Khalid
thelist at meidomus.com
Tue May 17 08:13:43 CDT 2005
Megan Holbrook wrote:
> Burhan Khalid wrote:
>
>> I can display the reports in a crude way (as simple tables with
>> alternating color rows). Is there a best/recommended way to format
>> these reports?
>
>
> Since you're dealing with what can be fairly dry information, you might
> also consider publishing graphs along with the individual reports,
> either generated in Excel, or one of the graph-generating scripts that
> is available (I can't make a specific suggestion but I know that there
> are a few out there). Graphs give users a more intuitive way to review
> the data which can be very helpful.
I'll look into this (never considered it really).
>
> Also, what are the recommendations for interactivity? As
>
>> an example, in my sales report, each product that is listed is linked
>> to its desciption/meta information -- each supplier is linked to their
>> record, etc. I have a feeling that this is not the correct way to do
>> things, but since I'm only a developer I don't know quite how to fix it.
>
>
> I don't see these links as an issue - it is useful to have quick access
> that way. To make it easier to return to the report, however, you might
> want to structure the link to the product or supplier info either as a)
> a popup, b) a new window, or c) a window within a frameset that includes
> a back button, whichever seems to be the most useful.
Currently, this is implemented as a popup.
>
>> Specifically for summary reports, is it recommended to have a link
>> for each period report (quarterly, yearly, monthly) or just have a
>> link for a report, then allow the user to pick the period?
>
>
> If you list just Sales by Supplier, Sales by Category, and Sales by
> Campaign, then you can allow the user to choose the period of report
> once they get to the page (monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.). This is
> the way that financial sites such as Yahoo present their charts (see
> http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=%5EDJI&t=1d&l=on&z=m&q=b&c=). You could
> also just have a link that says "Sales Reports" and then allow the user
> to choose their view and date range once they get to the area (using 2
> sets of radio buttons, for instance).
This shouldn't be that difficult to put together (we are doing a system
review so its a good time to modify things).
> If you want to get a lot more complex, you could implement a
> sophisticated chart generating script along with a database of sales
> information that would allow a user to choose their own range of
> dates/products/suppliers, etc. and then generate comparison graphs on
> the fly.
For this I'll probably need to borrow one of the accountants seeing as I
have no idea what kind of specific graphs they need.
Thanks for the ideas Megan :)
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