[thelist] Best Practices For Online Report Formatting

[Burhan Khalid]

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 :)