Best practices while creating reports and documents

• Consider using one of MicroStrategy's pre-designed templates when creating documents for a mobile device. The pre-designed templates take into account the size of the device's screen. For a list of pre-designed templates, see Creating documents for mobile devices using a template.

• Enable drilling to give users the ability to view information at different levels within a single report. Drilling allows users to get more information from one report without having to browse to, and run, other reports.

• When designing graph reports to be used on a mobile device, consider the following:

• To display tooltips on mobile devices, enable tooltips for the graph series while creating the graph. For steps, see the Basic Reporting Help.

• To maximize the graph size, move the legend below the graph.

• The following graph types are supported on Android devices:

• Bubble

• Funnel

• Gauges

• Horizontal Area

• Horizontal Bar

• Horizontal Line

• Pareto

• Pie

• Scatter

• Vertical Area

• Vertical Bar

• Vertical Line

• If you must display more information than can fit on one screen, use page-bys to break the graph in logical places across multiple screens.

• When designing grid reports, add padding around the cells to make the data more legible on mobile devices.

• Because Android devices come in varying screen sizes, a document designed for iOS may appear different when viewed on an Android device. To adapt a document's display to an Android device, while leaving the display on an iOS device unaffected, use the following properties to modify the document:

• Use the Fit Page or Fit Width options to ensure that the document fits to the size of the screen. Before selecting one of these Zoom options on the Home toolbar, optimize the layout for micro applications. For steps, see Formatting document tabs: layouts.

• By default, when the document is displayed on an Android device, any area not used to display the document is rendered in the same color as the background color defined for the document. You can use the Document Fill Color or Layout Watermark to provide a background for any part of the screen that is not used by the rest of the document.

• Manually size the column widths of any grids on a document, rather than using the automatic resizing options.

• Consider using Mobile Views to support different screen sizes, and different orientations of the device. For instructions on using Mobile Views, see Formatting documents for various screen sizes and different orientations: Mobile Views.

• Consider creating documents that include widgets, rather than converting reports to widgets. Certain features, such as Information Windows and network lines for the Map widget, can only be used in documents.

For steps to create widgets in documents, see Displaying data as interactive visualizations: Widgets.

• If you are creating an Interactive Grid widget, it is recommended that you assign an action to only one attribute form in the widget. For example, if you want one attribute to act as a selector, ensure that drilling is disabled for the Grid/Graph, and that attributes on the Grid/Graph do not link to other reports or documents.

For steps to create an Interactive Grid widget, see Displaying data in rows and columns: Interactive Grid widget.

• Consider using links to add interactivity to your document. For example, you can create links that allow users to send an email, make a phone call, or execute related reports and documents. For information and the steps to create links, see Opening a device's installed applications from documents and Linking to reports and documents from a mobile document.

• If you have prompts in a linked-to report, make sure that there are default answers saved for the prompts.