Introduction
Report is a type of document written/created by someone or a group of people. It can also be called as an organized collection of data, prepared for viewing or printing.
What ever application we do either it is a small billing software or a complex Payroll system for a bigger corporate, and the end of the day/quarter the top decisions maker or not going to look at our software/application we developed, they are going to look at the reports which our application generated with some click of buttons. These reports should be,
- Well organized
- Presentable
- Convey the fact
They are going to use these reports for their organization needs or for an analysis. W should realize the importance of reporting in software development.
In this article, I am going to talk about the key features which can provided in Excel reporting and how .Net applications can generate the report in Excel format.
Excel Reporting
Developer would have come across several reporting methodologies like formatting the data with tabs and spaces and printing them, or using reporting packages like Data report for VB6.0 or Crystal packages.
But the reports generated by these methods, provides very minimal features to the end users.
Lets see some scenarios,
Scenario 1:
The end user generates the report with some clicks of button, he see the report on the screen. Now we wants to show a Graph which conveys some meaning full data or he feels that if a graph is added to this report it will add more meaning to report. So what he needs to do,
- Need to check the agreement with the software vendor
- Need to raise a Change request.
- Series of call with the business analyst to explain how the graph should be generated.
- Report designer starts working on the report completes the report
- Series of testing has to be done
- Then deploy the report
Scenario 2:
The end user is going to send some report to their client or present the report in their board meeting and feels that he should not show all the data available but only a part of it. So what should we do for this case?
We create two report or en number of reports with the same set of data hiding some columns or making some structural changes to the report. The report is not flexible to hide some columns or generate report to their immediate requirement.
The Solution
The best solution would be developing a feature, which helps the user to create report on fly.
Report on fly
- LUsers can given the option, what fields needs to be display
- The type of analysis or calculations they want to do on the data available
- Add some graphical format of the data
- And many more things
Lets see how we can achieve some of these using excel.
We will see the remaining in our next parts. Send me your feedback and suggestions to sadhasivam1981@yahoo.com. Vist http://answerindotnet.blog.com/ to know more about me
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