Sometimes it helps to understand what a report is by also
understanding what a report is not. It’s easy to confuse the reports that
reporting solutions generate with other types of business reports, and even
documents, so it’s important clarify what a generated report is not designed to
do.
Generally speaking, a report is not:
·
A Word or Excel document. Unlike reports, documents are
“snapshots” of static data. They are sources of data and not consumers of
data. Once the report renders, its static output becomes a document! Figure 2
below helps illustrate this concept.
Fig 2: Data flows to reports and then exports to
static documents
Documents can be produced many ways, including:
·
Manually (in a program like Word or Excel)
·
Automatically (with a program like a documentation creator or PDF
creator)
·
By a reporting tool!
A document is the final static output of a report and it is
a read-only perspective of the source data.
·
Intended to be a flexible page designer.
A report can be very flexible and render many types of report items (for
instance, tables, charts, barcodes, images, shapes, and text), but it will
render those items according to the report definition. You cannot, for
instance, insert an item in one place on a report page unless you intended to
insert that item on every page in the report in the same place.
·
A data grid. Data grids, while great
tools for displaying data, do not offer the analytics that reports do and they
are not designed in a “paper oriented” manner. Data grids are also hard to move
between environments (such as windows and web applications), unlike a report definition
that can be shared between many environments.
·
A report does not require every page be manually
“designed” (as you would do with a Word document). A report instead uses
template rules and renders data according to those rules on every page of the
report.
To summarize, reporting solutions define the queries that
are used to retrieve data, as well as the layouts and styles (report
definitions) used to present the data into a report.