SAS® Web Report Studio: The Shape of Reporting

SAS^® Web Report Studio 2.1 enhances the already strong report building and delivery capabilities in SAS^®9 through improved ease of use and new functionality. One of its most powerful features is the ability to combine many data sources into a single report. A sales report might provide a page of tables and graphs that give a high level overview of the market and customers. On the next page it might provide an OLAP report that allows the user to slice and dice the data to look for new trends in the markets and new ways to sell the products. Finally the report might also show the outputs from some complex data models and forecasting results that provide insights into what will happen given key changes in practice. A further benefit is that reports can be built and distributed by non-technical users, thanks to a friendly interface and with data sources presented in easy to understand ways; the complexity of an underlying data warehouse or RDBMS is translated into business terms.

When is the data created?

Reports are measured by their timeliness, the relevance of the data and whether the user received it when it was needed. Data in a report can be dynamic (created when the report is viewed) or static (created in a batch process). Ensuring the right kind of data is important because it balances the load on servers and speeds up delivery. When a report builder saves a report definition, they can define the type of data and, if static, choose to schedule the report. Users can also look forward to report bursting: one report scheduled that delivers different portions to different people.

Report linking
This enhancement has two parts. First, any part of a report can become a link to another web page or report, giving access to resources outside SAS (a competitor website, for example). The second is more powerful and allows for clever, almost application-like linking: text in a report becomes the link and is passed to a receiving report as a subset rule.

Percent of total: often in reports, we want to see how one number compares to another and against an overall total. Reports can now include percent of totals at the click of a button.

Look and feel: every part of a report can now be customised: table cells, borders and text can have tailored fonts, sizes, colours and backgrounds. Graph axis and legends have the same level of control.

Template creation: reports can be saved as a template, layout without data, and then kept as private or shared resources.

Conditional highlighting: report value is also measured in terms of the action promoted. Conditional highlighting - relative and actual - helps drive action by drawing the viewer's eye to pertinent points. Designers can choose from effects including colours, fonts and styles and images.

Web OLAP Viewer
SAS^® Web OLAP viewer for Java is a powerful new interface for more experienced OLAP users. With all the features of Web Report Studio it includes a navigation bar for users to swap and change dimensions and measures on the fly. A very powerful feature is the provision of 'slicer' dimensions; another is the ability to bookmark a report. Reports created in Web OLAP Viewer can be saved for viewing in SAS Web Report Studio - such collaboration is an important component of SAS^® Enterprise BI Server.

Note: SAS Web Report Studio is available with SAS Enterprise BI Server and SAS^® BI Server.

For more information, please visit http://www.sas.com/technologies/bi/query_reporting/webreportstudio/