[thelist] Best Practices For Online Report Formatting

[Megan Holbrook]

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.

  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.

>   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).

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.

HTH,

M.
-- 
Megan Holbrook - megan at kapow.com
Partner - Business Development
kapow, inc. (www.kapow.com) - website design and development

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