In today’s fast-paced technological environment, everyone’s focus is often on the concept such as big data, data science, and so on. We are looking forward to better way to realize data visualization and presentation. Although the technical content of this work is not high, it often takes a lot of time. If you work in the IT department and are responsible for developing reports or dashboards, congratulations on finding the right place. This post will give you 5 suggestions to improve your report and dashboard development efficiency!

For IT engineers, the main difficulties in developing reports or dashboards are

• Data is stored in different databases, and it is difficult to retrieve data from each database.
• Business requirements are complex and changeable, and changes are difficult.
• Report operation and maintenance are difficult, and there is no unified standard for data changes.
• The report information is not communicated in place, and the business department cannot understand the report.

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Report preparation actually includes multiple parts such as original data extraction and processing, data analysis and sorting, report presentation, etc. However, for the business department, he/she can only see the appearance of the report, but not the process behind it.

Therefore, no matter how stable your data is, how fast the processing speed is, and how valuable data analysis is, if it cannot be presented to users through reports, it will not show real value.

If you are still using Excel to make reports, you must have encountered the following problems

• After the data volume reaches more than 1 million, Excel can’t put it down, and the processing speed is super slow.
• The effect of data visualization is not good, Excel and Access output are mainly tables, and data is piled up, and it is difficult to find the key points.
• Data extraction is troublesome. It takes a lot of time to import data from the company’s system every time, and often repeat data processing.

Here is a table made by Excel. It’s really confusing as most of the work is about copying and pasting.

The basic meaning of reporting is the presentation of the data. Dashboards are very often used in business reporting as they display data in a very eye-catching and logical method. You can see the business status of the enterprise through the very cool dashboard. Let’s look at these dashboards.

The key data can be displayed all at once, and the data linkage, drill-down correlation, and other functions make the report more vivid, I think your leader is more satisfied with these reports. The above dashboards are all made by FineReport, of course, you can also use other tools for comparison.

5 Tips to Help IT Engineers Improve Work Efficiency

Let’s talk about the functions of FineReport that can help IT engineers improve work efficiency. If you use other tools, I hope it can also give you some inspiration.

Get Through the Data of Various Business Systems

For large enterprises, business systems such as CRM, ERP, and OA often operate independently. Business data is scattered in different systems, and query data needs to enter different systems. It is very difficult to get through the business data. The best solution is to link all these systems together.

FineReport supports connecting a variety of databases. As long as you write some simple SQL statements, you can easily get through the data of each business system, and you don’t need to spend a lot of time to extract data everywhere.

Here are various data sources FineReport supports.

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Intelligent Data Entry to Avoid Dirty Data

Before developing reports or dashboards, IT engineers often spend a lot of time extracting and cleaning data. Due to the irregularity and incompleteness of data, it is often necessary to provide business personnel or users with authority such as adding, modifying, and deleting data from the database, which also leads to data errors. FineReport’s data entry function supports business personnel to directly fill in data from the front end and supports data specifications. As long as unexpected value is filled in, an alarm will be issued. In this way, you no longer have to worry about dirty data when filling in data.

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Design and Modify the Report Directly at the Front-end

Probably all IT engineers will have a headache for sudden demand changes. Many times, a change will cause a series of follow-up questions. Finally, after constant debugging, there may still be bugs. FineReport supports a visual editing interface, and each change can be previewed, and FineReport has built-in templates, whether title or format, which are all encapsulated functions. Just fill in the data directly, and drag and drop to complete a report or a dashboard.

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Report Automation

For IT engineers, every day they receive requests from different departments. It took most of the time just for the basic work of reporting, and the time for other tasks and personal learning and growth was greatly reduced. FineReport’s timing scheduling function can not only set up automatic sending of daily reports, weekly reports, and monthly reports but also notify the generated results in the form of a message or the mail, helping the business layer to analyze and make decisions in a timely manner.

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Highly Free Secondary Development

For some more personalized scenarios, FineReport provides various interfaces. IT engineers can call the corresponding interfaces according to their individual needs to realize various customized functions. Such as import interface, data source interface, logic processing interface, export printing interface, etc. For example, you can freely dock JFreeChart, echarts, etc., to customize the chart.

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Conclusion

Successful IT engineers should focus on efficiency and productivity, speed up the reporting process, and automate the entire data reporting system so that they can spend more time on higher-value tasks instead of being stuck all day long in the cycle of extracting, processing, and presenting data.