Moving to Advanced Reporting

Before you begin working with advanced reporting functionality, you must have a working project containing schema objects such as attributes and facts. For information on creating projects, facts, and attributes, refer to the Project Design Help.

The Project Design Help also contains a step-by-step example of designing a project for financial reporting and analysis. This includes standard reporting such as profit and loss reporting that provides analysis of a company's profits compared to its losses.

You can also use the MicroStrategy Tutorial that contains predesigned report objects and reports as a simulated project to familiarize yourself with MicroStrategy. Many of the facts, attributes, and other objects used in the examples in this guide are available in the MicroStrategy Tutorial project.

You can now create reports with more sophisticated analyses, using the concepts described in this guide. You will learn how to:

• Define level metrics, conditional metrics, transformation metrics, and compound metrics, and know when to use each type
• Create advanced filters such as attribute-to-attribute qualifications, relationship filters, joint element lists, and prompted filters, among others
• Set up custom groups to create relationships between attributes and to band, or slice, attribute elements using the values of a metric
• Create virtual attributes and perform row level math using consolidations
• Create prompts to save time by using one report to produce different results
• Define custom drill maps to set the drill paths for reports
• Customize SQL statements
• Create and use MDX Cube Reports to integrate with SAP BI, Essbase, and Microsoft Analysis Services
• Create and use data mart reports to establish relational tables that can be used like tables in a project schema

Once you have understood and practiced these concepts, you will be able to choose, manipulate, and format advanced reports that best answer your business questions.