Building a Simple BI Report

Views are the areas from Damstra Safety where fields are held.

It is useful before creating reports to have an understanding of where the data from the report you are about to create, comes from in Damstra Safety.

A report is a table and/or chart designed by you, based on field made available through the view.  

In order to populate your report you will have to add fields, from the view list on the right of the Data step, to the Columns and/or Rows lists.

Field Types

Dimension fields are typically text or date fields and are used to describe the data and/or can be used to section tables.

Metric fields are the numeric values to be measured in the report. For example, event cost sum, employee count, event count, average age.

Aggregations

Once you've added fields to your report, you may need to apply aggregations in order to summarise the results.

Aggregations include:

• Sum
• Average
• Min
• Max
• Count
• Count Distinct

Report sections allow you to break up large complex tables into a more readable format for your report consumers.

Report filters allow you to limit the amount of data that is returned, to the specific subset you require.

User prompt allows the consumer to limit the data once the report is activated. 

Advanced calculations are calculations that are applied to the results of a report after they have come back from the database.

There are analysis, statistical and text functions.  

To apply and advanced function first you will need to ensure the field you wish to apply it to has been added to your table. Often, when applying functions, you may find you need two copies of the field in your table; one to display the original values and the second to have a function applied to it.

When formatting a report you might find that you have what we call a "categorical" field that keeps repeating. Common types of these would be groupings of some description; event type, department, region, etc. It can be useful to group these repeating rows together by enabling the suppress duplicates formatting option on the field.

In this example we suppressed the duplicates in the Level 2 and Type of Event fields.

Totals and Sub Totals can be applied to fields in order to display summary information in the report.

Often coupled with the suppress duplicates option, these allow you to see summaries by particular categories.

In this example we applied totals to the Event ID field, and a sub total to the Type of Event field.

Sometimes you will find that you want to highlight particular values in a report to make them stand out when reading the results. This can be achieved by applying conditional formatting rules.

In this example we've used conditional formatting to the Event Status values to display cell alerts to draw the users attention.