Developing a business query and report design: Best practices

Before you create a report, you need to gather information from your user community, your project designer, your database administrator, and your MicroStrategy software. Some best practices are described here.

Gather information about your user audience

Ask yourself who the audience is for the report you plan to create. Questions you should have answers to include:

• What is the main topic area the report needs to address? In other words, at a general level, what do users need to know?
• What level of detail do users need? For example, sometimes executive level users only want to see a few key metrics of certain data. Other analysts may need to see very detailed financial numbers or inventory counts.
• What types of reports do users expect?
  • Higher level executives sometimes have expectations on how data is displayed in a report, so it can be helpful to ask what types of reports they are used to receiving, and whether it is important to try to adhere to that data display style.
  • For all user communities, determine whether they are willing to learn a new report format or whether it will be easier for them to receive reports in a style they have become used to. For example, some users adopt MicroStrategy so they can read spreadsheets of data more easily. A standard MicroStrategy grid report can be a good style to start with when introducing spreadsheet users to MicroStrategy reports.

• Who makes up your universe of users?
  • If your universe of users is extremely diverse, consider making reports as flexible as possible for each user who executes them, by adding prompts to the report. A prompt asks users questions about the results they want to see on a report, and then submits the appropriate report query to the data source. For details on prompts, see Asking for user input: Prompts.

  • Your universe of users may include different security requirements. For example, you may need a single report for a group of users, but that group includes both external and internal users, and you want to restrict some data from external view. You must confirm that appropriate security is in place for a report's underlying objects, and that security filters are in place to control row-level access to data. Object-level security is performed using ACLs, or access control lists.

    Security filters and ACLs are generally implemented by your system administrator, but one or both may be under the control of your project designer. See the System Administration Help for details on security filters, ACLs, and other security features.

Gather information about your data source

If you need an introduction to or refresher on data sources, review Understanding your data sources.

Make sure the data your organization stores can support the information your users want to analyze in a reporting environment. Questions you should ask include:

• Does your organization gather the data that users want to see reports on?
• Is your data organized in such a way that it can be used? Is the data reliable, and is it clean? One way to check on the reliability of your data is to create some simple grid reports designed to validate whether your data reflects your understanding of reality.

For example, if you have a good sense of how many customers own two or three of your organization's products, create a report that shows basic data on the count of customers who purchased those specific products over the past few years. If the numbers you see in the report do not come close to what you expected to see, it is worthwhile to spend some time with your database administrator to address the reliability of the data stored in your data source.

Gather information about your MicroStrategy project

Many of the objects within a project are generally created by the project's designer when the project is first created. Since you use these objects to design reports, it can be useful to understand your project's design, and specifically how the project's objects reflect the actual data in your organization's data source. In this way, you can choose objects to use on reports with full knowledge of the data source tables that data is coming from when the report is executed.

For details on general project design and data modeling, see the Project Design Help.

Questions you should ask about your project include:

•

Do objects exist in the MicroStrategy metadata which match what users want to see on reports? If not, you or another report designer can create them.

• MicroStrategy provides flexibility in combining information from your data source into specific objects which reflect the concepts that make sense to your users. Consolidations and custom groups are just two examples of ways you can present data to your users in a way that does not directly reflect your data source's storage structure. For an introduction to consolidations and custom groups, see Adding consolidations and custom groups .
• What VLDB (Very Large Database) properties have been set? These settings affect how the SQL is written when a report sends a SQL query to your data source. VLDB properties are usually determined by an administrator, but some may also be defined by a project's designer. All VLDB properties are described in detail in the System Administration Help.
• What project configuration settings have been set that will affect reports or documents? Ask your project designer about any configuration settings made for the project as a whole, because most reports and report objects revert to the project's settings when no object-specific or report-specific settings override them.

Locate or create time-savers

Consider the following approaches to report creation:

• Before you create a report, search through MicroStrategy to see whether a similar report already exists that can serve the same purpose as the report you intend to create. This can save you time and help you avoid unnecessary duplication in your MicroStrategy metadata.
• Before you create the finished report, use Microsoft Excel, Paint, PowerPoint, or another tool to create a mock-up of the report 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 report that may have to be redone.
• If you format the orientation of text in cells (for example, its vertical or horizontal alignment within a cell), you can use an autostyle to apply that same orientation to all reports you design. To do this, create an autostyle with the desired vertical and horizontal alignment (see Preset formatting: Autostyles). While creating the autostyle, from the Format menu select Row or Column, select Values, and choose your text alignment on the Alignment tab. Then right-click the project, select My Preferences, select the Grid tab, and select General. From the Default style drop-down list, select your new autostyle to be applied to all reports you create.

Quick report creation: Building a new report

If you are already familiar with MicroStrategy objects that are used to create a report, and you need to create a report quickly, MicroStrategy's Report Builder steps you through the process of quick report creation.

Quick reports can be useful to test out a basic report design concept for a more complex report, as described in Locate or create time-savers. Before you spend time creating, formatting, and fine-tuning a complex report, you can create a basic report quickly and ask users to provide feedback on its general usefulness in answering their business queries. Once you feel confident that your basic report design includes the appropriate objects, you can move on to create any additional objects necessary and to create the more complex, final report.

While Report Builder itself provides limited access to certain objects and functionality during report creation, when you are finished with Report Builder, it opens your new report in Design Mode if you have design privileges. In Design Mode you can add, edit, or remove objects freely, and you can provide additional functionality for users who will later execute the report to perform data analysis.

To create a report quickly using Report Builder, see Creating a report for analysis.

To create objects, see Creating and saving objects. To create a report from scratch, see Creating a grid report.