DIA Salsa Spotlight of the Day: Custom Reports
07:17 PM Mar 13, 2007
Long one of the DIA toolset's frustrating limitations, reports in Salsa -- flexible, customizable, savable -- put the copious data lodged in the system suddenly at your fingertips, not excluding visually relieving graphiness.
Heck, maybe too much. In striking a balance between power and usability, we've had to introduce some fairly advanced concepts to the Report Builder interface, and they can take some getting used to. The query builder actually lets you construct a SQL statement, so users who are comfortable with the argot will be ahead of the game, but really, everyone can play.
Yesterday, Anthony toured the buffed-up Query tool for pulling a finely-targeted slice of the list. Today, we talk Reports for pulling finely-targeted everything else.
Reportee
Reports can actually do some of the things that queries do, but they do a whole lot more -- because they can be run on any data object in the system. Begone, export-to-Excel-and-figure-it-out! (Naturally, you can still do that too.)
Pick the thing you're after, and it's a wealth of options in tabular form:
Change is Difficult
Recurring theme, that -- for you and for us. A perpetual tightrope-walks for a turnkey shop like ours is servicing the range of usability needs, from maximum customizability to ease of use for non-programmers to aesthetics and organization. Customizing reports involves handing the software a lot of variables. There's really no way around that. There may, however, be better ways to arrange those variables. It's an area of active investigation.Build from the back
Even if you'll be trial-and-erroring it to get the hang, it helps to know at the outset that you're after a report, say, like this:
... in order to know how to build it.
The Report builder is logical -- remorselessly so. What information is in the report? Donation amounts, dates, and instances. You gotta tell it that's what you want.
Is it a sum of amount donated grouped by date? A count of dates during a year during which donations averaged more than $100? Again, condiments make bad guessers. Instructions must be spoon-fed.
... and so forth ...
Use Cases
Near and dear to my old DonorPerfect-enterin' heart, reports make DIA readily deployable as a web-based donor database with all the necessary capacity for aggregation and microtargets. But the use cases aren't hard to think up beyond that, and are as multitudinous as the staff, causes and projects to which the mighty Clan McDIA devote themselves. They'll take a little bit of piping at -- by us and our users -- to find the perfect harmony, but the sonorous drone of the pipes will resound across the highlands.If the Report Builder at first strikes you as a little too much of a hurdle, try working with the existing reports that are pre-built into your account--they cover a lot of ground, and may meet most of your immediate needs. If they don't, hopefully they'll inspire you to build your own, and serve as an example when you do. Meanwhile, we'll be looking for ways to make the learning curve a little easier to climb. Tune in, log on, and drop us some feedback.
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