A web developer friend of mine, was giving me her feedback on Apsona and she used the words, ” I liked the elegant report mechanism in Apsona”.  For some reason I have always associated elegance with a dress or a setting not in an application. When I think of Apsona’s reporting,  it was always associated with the words: powerful, instantaneous, viualization, business intelligence and so on. So lets look at Apsona’s reporting  with hopefully a  touch of elegance.

Apsona can host tables and link tables with fields called reference fields. So for a business that uses spread sheets for their data management, and  have to run regular reports, Apsona can be very handy. Basically import data for the tables which have no dependencies first and then import data for the tables which  are dependant and link the tables with reference fields  and run reports of them.

The  report building process is also very simple. To create a report, click  on reports found under each table heading. Once in the reports page click on New and the report wizard opens. There are two tabs, the layout tab and the filter terms tab.  Give the report a name and click the ‘Add column’ in the layout tab. All the fields of the table drop down. If you scroll down the list of fields, you will see all the fields of the related tables as well. Click on the fields you want for the report. Once the fields are selected, with the drag and drop capability you can rearrange fields around. You can also choose to edit field names  just for the report. Click on filter terms to add any filter criteria for the report and then click Save &  run button. The report renders instantly. The data is now seen in a tabular format. So a report created with fields from multi tables, an array  of different data types and filter criteria can be built in seconds. Apsona has calculated field which can give counts, sum, totals and average. Complex formulae can be applied to the report using javascript. Mathematical elegance!

The newly created  report  can now be visualized  in  different ways. You can choose to see data in a calendar view, a  matrix, a bar chart or even groups.

So for example, let’s say you want to see all your opportunties closing by dates in a particular month, the calendar view is perfect for such data. All you have to do is click on visualize and select the calendar view. Select a date field value and a label field value. Click month grid or vertically stacked if you prefer to see your data vertically stacked . Once you click OK  the data can be visualized so differently.  Similarly, if you want to see a report of all your clients grouped by the different  insurance plans  you offer,  choose the Grouping option for the visualization.

Call it visual design or elegance crunching data suddenly seems so much fun. Try it out and let me know your views.

Till next time, Adios!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 9:02 am and is filed under App maker, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.