MicroStrategy ONE

Design the document effectively

  • Before you create the finished document, use Microsoft Excel, Paint, PowerPoint, or another tool to create a mock-up of the document you intend to design. Send the mock-up to your user community to gather their feedback on its usefulness. This can save you valuable time creating a complex, finished document that may have to be redone.

  • Hide unused document sections (by collapsing the section in the Layout area) so that the document is easier to work with.

  • Use the grouping feature and/or incremental fetch to minimize the amount of data passed between the web server and the web browser, for documents designed to be viewed in MicroStrategy Web.

  • Determine how to load panels in panel stacks when the document is viewed in MicroStrategy Web. All the panels can be pre-loaded, or only the first panel.

  • When panels are pre-loaded, they display immediately when the user selects a different panel.

  • However, if the user is unlikely to access all the panels in a panel stack, or if you want to optimize the initial load time of the document, you can specify that the panels load only when a user changes to a different panel. Note that this on-demand panel loading only occurs when the document is executed in MicroStrategy Web with DHTML enabled.

  • Determine whether the dataset(s) will return a large amount of data. If so, consider addinggroupingto the document, by choosing which attributes you want to group the pages by.

  • Make the following decisions as you are planning the design of your document, not after you are finished:

  • Determine the logic for page breaks.

  • Decide what export options you will enable for users of this document.

  • Decide whether you need landscape or vertical orientation to best display the data you want to include.

  • If the document will be viewed in PDF, be sure to include bookmarks.

  • Do not include so many graphical objects that the data becomes unimportant. Make sure the data is the main focus of the document. The overall goal is to achieve a clean look.

  • Plan your design so that all related data can be seen on a single screen or page, and that it can be interpreted from the top left to the bottom right.

  • Save your document frequently as you design and make formatting changes to it.

For additional best practices when designing a Report Services (RS) dashboard and when using effects and widgets, see Best practices for designing effective RS dashboards.

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