When it comes to reports, many people think of countless Excel spreadsheets and boring numbers. “How do I make visually stunning reports to catch my boss’s eyes?” “How to create valuable reports to make managers quickly discover insights?” These are the most common questions asked by report providers.
The answer is easy; that is, make your reports dynamic.
Note: All the dynamic reports templates shown in this article are created by FineReport, a powerful reporting software that has been honorably mentioned by Gartner Magic Quadrant for ABI Platforms. You can download FineReport for free and have a try!
Contents
1. What Are Dynamic Reports?
Dynamic reports encompass more than just reports featuring dynamic charts. These reports are dynamically generated, drawing from the most up-to-date information available, and offer interactive features that empower end-users to effortlessly analyze diverse datasets. In essence, dynamic reporting entails real-time, interactive reports that adapt to the latest data, ensuring a comprehensive and user-friendly analytical experience.
2. Examples of Dynamic Reports
Note: The examples below are made with FineReport.
a. Parameter filters: Filtering with parameters is the primary function of the dynamic reports. When using multiple data sources, you can use parameters to select or input values to filter all the data you want.
b. Parameter linkage: Linking parameters is another basic function of dynamic reports. It builds a correlation between the two charts. For example, when you click the city on the map, the correlated charts will show the corresponding product analysis and customer analysis of this city.
c. Drill down: Drill down report is a common type of dynamic report. It enables the user to navigate the data from a comprehensive view of the data to a more detailed one.
d. Dynamic display on the parameter panel: In many cases, dynamic reports empower users by allowing the selected option in one drop-down box to influence the options in another, facilitating dynamic reporting. For instance, within a dynamic report interface, you can query information for any period when opting for a day-based query. Nevertheless, the true potential of dynamic reporting unfolds when you choose to query by month, limiting the available data to a specific month. This interactive feature enhances the adaptability and user-driven nature of dynamic reports.
e. Dynamic conditions: If you wish to filter data in the dynamic report table but are uncertain about specific query conditions, dynamic reporting conditions provide a solution to your problem.
For example, you forget the supplier’s full name and only remember that it begins with ‘Li’. Input ‘Li’ in the text box and click ‘Query,’ all the suppliers whose name contains ‘Li’ will be listed.
3. How to Make Dynamic Reports?
We have talked about real-time reporting in detail in the last article, including the benefits and how to implement it.
Many readers left the message that real-time reporting frees them from repetitive work. And they were surprised by how easy it is to implement the real-time reporting following the tutorial.
So, the following tutorial will focus on the interactive part of dynamic reports. I will use FineReport in the tutorial because it is easiest to make interactive reports after I tried a lot of dynamic reporting tools.
Let’s take this dynamic report as an example, which is a typical interactive report in the business. You can query the information of specific cities, and the ‘region’ box controls the ‘province’ box, and the ‘province’ box controls the ‘city’ box.
Step 1: Connect to the database and import the data
FineReport supports multiple data sources, including Excel. You can connect to the databases in a few clicks.
Step 2: Create a dataset with parameters
This step is to define the parameters. In this step, all you need is simple reporting tools for SQL rather than complex programming languages. For the IT department, I believe SQL is a piece of cake. But don’t worry if you don’t know SQL before. This operation only requires basic SQL, and it won’t take you long to master it.
- Create dataset [ds1] with 3 parameters
2. Create dataset [region] to query all regions
3. Create a dataset [province] with a parameter to query provinces in a certain region
4. Create a dataset [province] with a parameter to query cities in certain regions and provinces
Step 3: Set widgets in the parameter interface
FineReport provides dozens of controls such as a text field, drop-down tree, checkbox, time, date, and a drop-down box.
After binding the control and values, you can freely control and filter the content of the report display.
Step 4: Drag data columns into cells
4. Leverage Dynamic Reports Tools to Make Your Reports Stunning
As demonstrated above, employing dynamic reporting tools like FineReport makes creating real-time and interactive dynamic reports a straightforward process. However, FineReport’s advantages in visualization extend beyond these capabilities. The tool not only excels in dynamic reporting, enabling real-time and interactive features, but it also surpasses expectations in the realm of data visualization.
Let’s discover how to use FineReport as a report maker to amend your work.
19 categories and 50+ styles HTML charts
FineReport supports dozens of charts that meet different needs in business. These charts are self-developed by HTML5, which can be used cross-platform, adaptive to web design, and support instant updates.
Various dynamic interactive effects
In addition to the interactions highlighted above, there are a plethora of cool features in dynamic reporting, including dynamic reports with various interactive charts. You can leverage data tips, interactive highlighting, series interaction, online switch, coordinate scaling, and automatic refresh functionalities to enhance interactive analysis within dynamic reports.
Stunning 3D map and other 3D visualization effects
FineReport provides cool maps with advanced chart effects, as a supplement to basic types of charts. FineReport supports 3D cylindrical earth, 3D point earth, 3D flow on earth, KPI card, particle flip counter, time gear, catalog gear, carousel GIS point map, and so on.
5. Summary of Dynamic Reports
Making your reports dynamic and interactive is the secret of making your reports outstanding. And using a dynamic reporting tool would be a great choice.
FineReport used in the article has been implemented and utilized by nearly 38,000 enterprises or institutions in their reporting projects. Embark on your exciting data journey with FineReport, and the personal version is available at no cost!
For enterprise users, connect with us to receive an exclusive quote on our premium enterprise edition, designed to propel your business with cutting-edge solutions tailored to your specific needs in dynamic reporting.
Also, please feel free to make an appointment for a live demo with our product experts. We will be more clear about your needs and see how FineReport can help you and your organization transform data into value.
