Chapter 16: Introduction to Reporting

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If you have read Parts I and II of this book, Part III is your reward; you finally get to report, explore, and analyze data in ways that improve your business. Although BusinessObjects has a powerful ad hoc query and reporting engine, most BusinessObjects deployments involve standard reports. These reports may be common information requirements with key business indicators that the majority of users refresh with their own view of the data. A typical deployment is geared to two types of users: report readers who access standard reports and report authors who build the standard reports. Report authors may also build ad hoc reports for individual and one-time analyses (refer to Chapter 3 for more information on different user segments). Starting with a blank screen and no data can be very discouraging. For this reason, Part III of this book is organized for users who start by viewing and analyzing a standard report and then evolve to modify the report and/or build new ones.

If you like to start off with your own data and dive right in, then skip ahead to Chapter 21 and flip back to Chapters 16–20 for formatting and analysis.

About the Sample Data

This section of the book uses a sample wine database for many of the reports and queries. As Business Objects is a French company, I thought it would be a way to pay homage to the company’s origins by exploring one of France’s premier exports (plus I am a true wine novice, and BusinessObjects provides an excellent way to uncover some good wine values!).

Rating and price data was provided compliments of eRobert Parker (www.erobertparker.com) and WineAlert (www.winealert.com), respectively. Robert Parker is the world’s leading wine critic and founded the publication The Wine Advocate. He also is a contributing editor for Food and Wine Magazine. Wine Alert is an Internet company that surveys retailers, distributors, and wholesalers to help consumers find the best wine prices. The eRobert Parker site selected the wines at random, and I matched them with prices provided by Wine Alert. The wine database contains ratings for approximately 1,800 wines and prices for approximately 300 of the rated wines. Disclaimer: this database is provided purely for instructional purposes and should not be used to draw any conclusions about individual bottles of wine or wine markets. You can download a copy of the database and universe from www.osborne.com.

The vendor also provides a sample universe, EFASHION, and reports that are used in isolated instances for functionality not available in the wine database; contact your BusinessObjects administrator for access to this sample data set. The EFASHION universe is based on fictional data from a retail clothing store. It contains three years of sales and promotion costs for 211 clothing articles and 13 stores. Both the wine database and the EFASHION universe use MS Access as the database engine. In certain cases in which I want to demonstrate complex queries using Oracle, I use the sample Sales History tables provided by Oracle.

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