Introduction to Reporting

Workbooks provides an extremely powerful and flexible reporting engine which allows you to extract information from your database in the way that best suits your business.

There are three components to reporting in Workbooks, these are:

Reports

Reports can be created using information inside records.  You can create simple reports which results in a set of fields being returned in the form of columns and rows, much like a spreadsheet. Or you can build a summary report which summarises information using Formulae such as totals, counts or averages. You can also apply criteria to your reports, enabling you to refine your set of data. 

Using Workbooks you can also ‘join’ together records of different types, allowing you to create reports which contain fields from both record types.  

For example you could create a report from the People record listing the person’s name and email address and then using criteria, limit that report to only include People who have ‘Director’ in their job title.  

In addition you could join to their employer's Organisation record and include the Revenue from the organisation record.  Finally you could also apply a criteria to the Revenue field to only select Organisations with revenues of £5m or more.  

This allows you to build a report of all people in your database whose job title includes the word ‘Director’ that work for organisations with revenues of more than £5m.

Bulk Actions can be carried out on Reports using a Script which can be run against the data set identified in the Report.

Charts

Once you have built a report you can build a chart from that report.  Workbooks supports the following types of charts: Pie Chart, Bar Charts, Line Charts & Dials (dials are similar to a gauge).

Dashboards

Dashboards enable you to bring together management information from reports and charts in a central place.  You can create as many dashboards as you require and share them with colleagues and you can drill down through the dashboard to the underlying report data.