Choosing the right microsoft reporting technology

To read any of the other parts to this series follow the links below. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Skip to content Twitter Linkedin Pinterest. March 6, devinknight Excel 4 comments. Who Uses it No long explanation needed here because this tool is for end users as previously detailed.

How is it consumed The two typical ways of consuming Excel PivotTable reports are opening the. Limitations One major limitation some find is depending on the version of Excel you are running that row limits exist. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:.

Email required Address never made public. Now, because this is one of the newest reporting tools you can count on much of this post to get outdated over time. In fact, a lot of the limitation you may see me describe are rumored to be fixed in future releases. This will be the last part of this series that describes tools, but there will be a part 6 that will help guide you in making the appropriate decision on which tool to use for each report you design.

In a nutshell Power View is a highly visual ad hoc reporting tool for end users. It is designed with the end user in mind and because of that it is incredibly simple to create really impressive reports.

Within a half dozen clicks a user can create a report similar to what you see below. The tool used for designing the reports is actually dependent solely on Silverlight 5 subject to change being installed. Power View is a highly metadata driven tool, which means it is important to to have a well defined data source.

You can easily create multiple views on a report so that report consumers can view the data represented on multiple pages and in multiple ways. Also, Power View reports can easily be exported into tools like PowerPoint so users no longer have to take screenshots of reports to embed in PowerPoint slide decks.

With Power View you will be able to look at live views of the report inside the slide deck and interactive with it like you would in SharePoint. The quickest way to get started with the tool is to use the SharePoint template site called a PowerPivot Site which has all the components needed to begin development. If you would like to get started with learning Power View there are several live demos available.

Since the release of Power View people have often asked me if I think that it means an end for PerformancePoint. PerformancePoint I consider more of an executive level dashboarding tool while Power View is for user created ad hoc reporting.

I prefer to have IT managing and controlling content that is exposed to executives and large scaled deployments to the entire company. Power View has been created for the purposes of end users designing their own reports. With the first version of Power View that is made very clear because everything is drag and drop. The word static here is referring to the report layout rather than the report data obviously the data will change.

For example, I want my sales team to be able to review a line item detail of each of their sales from the prior day. With Reporting Services I could have the sales team either log onto a web front end to view a live version of the report or I could have the report emailed to them daily.

The reports developed with the tool are highly customizable. In fact just about any object of the report can be manually changed or made dynamic with the expression language it uses. With charts, gauges, indicators, sparklines and maps you have many of the necessary tools for creating an impressive dashboard. There are other tools that like PerformancePoint that can create more impressive interactive dashboards but Reporting Services can get the job done. Reporting Services is also highly scalable.

Without much effort the workload for report processing can be shared across multiple instances of reporting services. After installing multiple instances the native wizard guides you through creating a farm of report servers.

Another thing worth noting because it will not be true of all the other tools I discuss in this series is that it can connect to virtually any data source you have. While there are some parts of Reporting Services that can provide ad hoc reporting capabilities the core of the tool is for static reporting. If you really have a need for ad hoc reporting and could care less about report layout than you would likely pick another tool like Excel. While Reporting Services does have functionality for a power user to create their own reports it is typically thought of as a developers tool.

So report developers would use the tool Business Intelligence Development Studio BIDS , which is part of the SQL Server install to create incredibly detailed reports with almost endless flexibility when it comes the visualizations. The tool that power users can use for creating reports is called Report Builder.

It has almost all the same functionality as BIDS but has been simplified a little for end users with more wizards and easier ways to bring in datasets. Because it has a lot of the same functionality of the developers too you will find that this tool is for highly technical end user.