About sample data and the MicroStrategy Tutorial project

MicroStrategy comes with a sample project called MicroStrategy Tutorial. The theme of the MicroStrategy Tutorial project is activity in a retail store over a three-year time period. The retail store sells electronics, books, movies, and music.

The Tutorial project includes sample data, such as actual customer names and items purchased. It also includes predesigned sample reports. The reporting areas are grouped logically so you can see reports based on business roles, MicroStrategy platform capabilities, or various subject areas such as customer analysis, inventory and supply chain analysis, sales and profitability analysis, and so on. Reports that are useful in more than one area are duplicated in all applicable folders.

The Tutorial project lets you familiarize yourself with MicroStrategy because you can run the sample reports in the Tutorial project and experience various ways to analyze data.

Most of the reports discussed in this chapter exist in the MicroStrategy Tutorial project. These sample reports show you how you can build and generate reports.

To access the Tutorial project, follow the steps in the section above to log in to MicroStrategy Web or MicroStrategy Developer. Once you have logged in, you can access the reports in the Tutorial project.

Warehouse data in the sample MicroStrategy projects is updated regularly, and these changes are reflected in the documentation whenever possible. However, the sample reports, documents, objects, and images in this guide may display warehouse data that no longer appears in the software.

Sample analysis areas

The MicroStrategy Tutorial project comes with the following groups of reports:

• Business Roles: This folder contains reports for different types of business intelligence users, such as billing managers, brand managers, company executives, sales managers, and operations managers. For example, brand managers can see a report for Brand Performance by Region. A billing manager can see data in a report called Invoice Statements by Selected Customers, as well as a customer-level transaction detail report.
• Documents and Scorecards: This folder contains several examples of documents. Documents provide a distilled view of the business, organized in logical sections, often containing interactive visualizations and other adaptive features.
• Enterprise Reporting Documents: This folder contains examples of different types of enterprise reporting documents, such as scorecards and dashboard-style documents, managed metrics reports, production and operational reports, invoices and statements, and business reports. The documents in this folder are a sample of the types of documents that can be built using MicroStrategy Report Services.
• MicroStrategy Platform Capabilities: This folder contains examples of the sophisticated capabilities within the MicroStrategy platform. Use the reports, documents, and dashboards to get a better feel for platform functionality. For example, the Graph Styles folder contains examples of most of the graph types that can be created in MicroStrategy. The Ad Hoc Reporting folder shows examples of commonly used features like sorting and thresholds.
• Subject Areas: This folder contains reports that cover various topics such as customer analysis, enterprise performance management, human resources analysis, inventory and supply chain analysis, sales and profitability analysis, and supplier analysis.