Zoho Reports Update: Set Threshold Markers & Show/Hide Totals in Pivot Tables

May 21, 2010 | By Clarence

Zoho Reports had an update earlier this week and it brought in two interesting new features – Setting Thresholds in Charts and Show/Hide Options in Pivot Tables.

Thresholds in Charts
Businesses thrive when they try to perform better than in the past. Their performance can be quantified through metrics such as more sales/profit, lesser cost, higher productivity/operating efficiency etc. This is where setting benchmarks, thresholds & goals help, by providing a clear target of what’s to be achieved.

You can now set threshold markers in the charts you make using Zoho Reports. This helps in better visualization & tracking of your key performance data. For each chart, you can add a maximum of 4 threshold values and also name each of these thresholds too.

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How to Use Zoho Reports to Track your Marketing & Sales

May 4, 2010 | By Clarence

At Zoho, we believe in eating our own dog food. Our CEO spoke on this topic with Ramon Ray of Smallbiztechnology.com. We have had posts before explaining how Zoho Creator is put to good use in Zoho Corp. In this post, we’ll see how Zoho Reports is being used by our Sales/Marketing teams for tracking sign-ups, marketing spend and sales numbers. This will be useful & relevant for any company/startup that offer software as service (like what Zoho does). As you know, successful businesses effectively track their daily numbers.

Let’s start with the daily sign-ups. The data comes from our Zoho User Management system. Zoho Reports, thanks to its Data Import API, allows us to get the new user sign-ups and sign-in (existing user logins) data into a reporting database automatically (it’s scheduled to import data everyday).

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Zoho Reports: Advanced Summarizing Options in Pivot Tables

March 18, 2010 | By Clarence

Spreadsheet users know the importance of pivot tables and the role they play in easy summarizing and visualization of data. With Zoho Reports, you can make pivots by drag-and-drop. There are many summary functions available – Sum, Maximum, Minimum, Average and Count – when constructing pivots. And now, further options are available for each of these functions as shown in the below screenshot.

The options available are

Normal: Applies the chosen summary function over the data as is
% of Row: Displays the data as a percentage of the total for each row
% of Column: Displays the data as a percentage of the total for each column
% of Total: Displays the chosen summary function as a percentage of the grand total of all data present in the report
Running Total: Displays data in successive cells as a running (cumulative) total of a selected field
Difference From: Displays data in each cell as the difference from value in the previous cell, based on the base field provided
% of: Displays data in each cell as a % of value in the previous cell, based on the base field provided
% of Difference From: Displays data in each cell as a % of difference from the value in the previous cell, based on the base field provided

In the featured ‘Super Store Sales’ database, we now have some pivots to demonstrate the new enhanced functions.

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Zoho Reports: Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics Dashboard

February 17, 2010 | By Clarence

We had earlier made a live dashboard for the Beijing Summer Olympics 2008. A good many sports enthusiasts visited it and many of you had good things to say about it. For the ongoing Winter Olympics at Vancouver, Canada, we found there are a good many sites offering live updates with lots of cool info. However, a single page where you get to see the results and trends at a glance was lacking. So with that in mind, we collected information from different data sources and built a dashboard using Zoho Reports. It is available at http://vancouver2010.wiki.zoho.com.

Some of the reports that form part of the dashboard

Medal standings till now
Medals won today (by athletes & by nations)
Top 5 performing countries (classification by men/women also available)
Progress of top performing nations till now
How the top countries have performed across the various sports disciplines

We are updating the dashboard as often as we can, so that you can get a bird’s eye view of what’s happening at Vancouver.

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Zoho Reports Moves Out of Beta, Pricing Plans Announced

December 15, 2009 | By Clarence

We’re happy to announce that Zoho Reports, our online business intelligence & reporting tool has graduated out of beta today. Zoho Reports helps businesses make better sense of their data by providing useful insights through powerful reporting and analytics, which
transforms to informed decision making. It achieves this through an impressive set of capabilities that lets users easily perform a variety of tasks, such as:

Upload any data. Zoho Reports lets users securely upload spreadsheets and tabular data such as .CSV, .TSV, .XLS or .HTML files. Of course, users can also add
data directly using the spreadsheet-like interface.
Push data from any application. Zoho Reports works with hosted and traditional (in-house, behind a firewall) business applications and databases for reporting and analysis.

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Adding Interactive Reports to your Presentations

October 15, 2009 | By Clarence

One of the important things we have been focusing out this year has been integration between the various Zoho apps. An example of such an integration – Zoho Show has long allowed embedding of Zoho Sheet’s spreadsheets and charts. The same is now possible with Zoho Reports too. You can embed your cool reports that you created in Zoho Reports into a Zoho Show presentation and impress your audience with live interactive reports.

Let’s say as your company’s Sales Manager, you are to present the month’s sales figures. Use Zoho Reports to crunch all your sales data, make reports out of it and Zoho Show to make your presentation. Embedding the reports from Zoho Reports, you make the presentation much more interactive and powerful.…

Zoho Reports : Connectors for Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and MS Access Databases

July 30, 2009 | By Clarence

So much of your business data from many of your applications lie in a database like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL or MS Access,
behind a firewall. Getting meaningful reports out of such databases and
taking corrective actions based on those reports is what business
intelligence is all about. The databases themselves are typically
costly and creating reports out of them isn’t that easy. Buying
additional reporting tools, which you need to install and maintain, adds up to your costs. But by making your data available in Zoho Reports, you get
these major benefits :

Create meaningful reports easily using just drag-and-drop
The reports you create are accessible from anywhere
Enable collaborative analysis and reporting
Share the reports over the web to whoever you want
Very affordable, pay-as-you-go monthly pricing plans (Zoho Reports is actually free, as of now)

Zoho
Reports makes it easy to push data from behind-the-firewall databases
(and CSV files too) by providing you with an Upload Tool (a database
connector).

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Author Archives : Clarence