You may have viewed many articles or reviews about reporting tools lists or open-source reporting tools. Have you decided which to choose among these? Do you feel confused, which is best for you?
Before you decided, please ask yourself, do you know the answers to the following questions?
The answers may help you to make a better decision.
In other words, you can view reporting software as various styles+ dynamic data.
One is the reporting software that mainly deals with the fixed report. When creating the fixed reports, the IT department will first define the picking-number formula and arithmetic logic. The background covers complex operations.
In the foreground, business people can view, add, delete, or change the data on the web. It does not involve the modification of the report structure. The fixed report is the most common in daily report development.
This type of reporting tool is suitable for IT departments and reports developers in different departments.
Another type of reporting tool is working as the function of the BI tools, which is called self-service reporting.
Business people can drag the fields to create the reports without predefined structure. It can deal with simple temporary queries.
This type of reporting tool is suitable for data analysts or business analysts.
With the rich charts and graphs, the reports are no more just the tables. The KPIs can be tracked via dashboards on the TV screen in the meeting.
The project progress can be monitored in the monitoring center.
The exhibition also becomes more technical.
And the automatic refresh ensures the analysis up-to-date.
First, generating reports manually is easy to make errors and is time-consuming.
Second, it’s hard to detect problems in Excel in real-time. Once the data is wrong, the query in Excel takes a lot of time. But with reporting tools, you can understand the data information through simple queries with the widgets.
Finally, Excel spreadsheets are presented in very few ways. Although some of the features of Excel spreadsheets are now much improved, they still lag behind reporting tools.
There are many BI software with reporting capabilities. Many people confuse reporting software with BI software, but they are different.
In conclusion, a reporting tool is mainly for data display, while a BI tool emphasizes data analysis. As mentioned above, reporting tools are primarily for IT departments or report developers. They use reporting software to make data reports and chart reports, as well as electronic invoices, process sheets, receipts, etc. These show you past and current status.
Business intelligence software is primarily for business people and data analysts. The essence of BI software is ‘data+business understanding’.
The ‘data’ part is like the reporting software, which is statistics and presentation of data.
‘Business understanding’ means realizing in-depth data analysis and smart data forecast, via BI functions such as OLAP analysis, data mining, and so on. It tells you why the statuses are the way they are, and how to improve performance moving forward.
However, in terms of reports, BI software is weak in the richness of report styles, the diversity of chart and print function.
Take FineReport as an example. As reporting software, FineReport provides three types of reports: General Report, Aggregation Report, and Dashboard. Among them, the aggregation report allows users to drag&drop the aggregation blocks to create irregular reports.
Besides, users can export or print the reports to different formats such as Excel, Word, and PDF. These particular functions make reporting tools distinctive in reporting.
