About Arvind

Marketing & Business Development, Zoho Reports, SAAS BI, P: +1 408 916 9191 x 8064

Zoho Reports: Cascading User Filters

September 1, 2011 | By Arvind

As you get to use a piece of software or application more and more, you tend to discover more and more about its capabilities. A little icon here, a shortcut key there – finding those hidden jewels results in Eureka moments that make you go, “Aha, so it’s done that way!” Sometimes, you may even find Easter eggs, cleverly placed by fun-loving programmers.

Before I digress further, let’s take the case of ‘User Filters’ in Zoho Reports. While continuing to use the drag-and-drop report designer, one day you might have noticed the third tab and asked yourselves, “How different is this ‘User Filters’ tab from the other ‘Filters’ tab?” and clicked on it.…

Dashboard: US Economic Indicators

July 27, 2011 | By Arvind

Articles about the state of the economy in the media invariably feature one or more graphs. Say how the GDP has fared over the last few quarters or how the inflation has been over the last few years. Various government agencies are involved in publishing these indicators. Sites like http://www.data.gov, http://www.bea.gov, http://www.census.gov etc publish lots of such data regularly. The difficulty here is that you might get overwhelmed with loads of data. You can get lost in searching for what you want across multiple sites. So we thought of putting some of the important indicators all at one place, as a Zoho Reports dashboard.

You can mouse over/click a bar or a point to see the underlying data. Let us know if you would like any other metric to be included in the above dashboard.…

New in Zoho Reports: Dashboards Resizing and More Chart Sorting Options

July 8, 2011 | By Arvind

The latest update to Zoho Reports brought in two nifty features. Let’s look at them in detail.

Dashboards Resizing

A dashboard in Zoho Reports is created by dragging and dropping multiple reports on a single page. Till now, we had one/two column layout options with fixed width & height. We have brought in greater flexibility to the layout now. You can now resize each of the embedded reports within a dashboard. This makes your dashboard look prettier, allotting more space for longer/wider reports, avoiding unnecessary blank spaces where you need to have shorter/smaller reports etc.

Resizing the reports is easy. Go to the Edit Design mode, hover your mouse over the report’s borders that need to be resized and drag as needed.…

Explore Zoho Reports Series: Part III – Form Interface using Zoho Creator

June 13, 2011 | By Arvind

In Zoho Reports, data is stored as database tables. Unlike in conventional databases, this tabular data can be readily edited in Zoho Reports, using its spreadsheet-like interface. When new data is to be entered, it would be possible to do so using this interface. But wouldn’t it be easier and more functional if we had a form interface? There can be situations where data entry has to happen without the user seeing the whole database.

Enter Zoho Creator, our friendly online app creator and form builder. All you have to do is follow three simple steps as below to get your form interface.

Create the form using Zoho Creator’s drag-and-drop interface.
When creating the form, uncheck the ‘Store data in Creator’ option
Include a short Deluge script that instructs Zoho Creator to directly store data in Zoho Reports.

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Explore Zoho Reports Series: Part II – Colors

May 20, 2011 | By Arvind

In the first post of this series, we got to know all about ‘Formula Column‘ – the various formula types we support, how/where to use them etc. In this post, let’s see another little explored feature of Zoho Reports – Colors.

As you know, Zoho Reports allows you to easily create various types of reports like charts, pivot tables, summary tables, dashboards etc. Charts are particularly liked by many due to their visual appeal and the easy manner in which they get to convey trends and to interpret or segregate large amounts of data. When it comes to charts, color is an important aspect as it helps differentiate one metric/measure from another. There are two different aspects of color when it comes to Zoho Reports.…

Openbravo – Zoho Reports Integration

May 2, 2011 | By Arvind

Asier Zabaleta, a consultant at Openbravo (open source, agile ERP solution for SMBs) has developed a nice integration between Openbravo and Zoho Reports. Openbravo users can now easily have all their data imported into Zoho Reports, create charts, pivot tables, dashboards in Zoho Reports and make them as a part of their Openbravo ERP system. Read more about how to set up Zoho Reports as Openbravo’s reporting module.

If you are an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) like Openbravo, you too can take all the advantages offered by Zoho Reports and make it as the integrated reporting module of your product/service. We offer a white label solution that you can use for making your own private labeled (re-branded) reporting solution for your clients. Know more.…

Case Study: How Zoho Reports Helps Optimize Globo’s TV Programming

April 20, 2011 | By Arvind

Globo, which is currently the largest commercial television network of Latin America and the third largest in the world (after CBS and NBC), uses Zoho Reports to analyze viewership data about videos and TV shows in its TV and cable TV divisions. Globo is watched by an estimated 120 million people daily.

Here’s what Alexandre Oppermann, Globo’s Business Intelligence Co-ordinator – Web Analytics, had to say about Zoho Reports:

Using Zoho Reports, we generate reports and dashboards that reveal the daily and monthly views of each show and video in its TV and cable TV divisions. Currently, Globo has 40 people actively using Zoho Reports to report against 8.5 million rows of data. And this data set is growing continuously as we aggregate more data everyday.

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