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. You can mouseover the embedded charts and get relevant values displayed. You can click on the data points in the chart and drill down to the actual values too. See such a slide show in action below (embedding the presentation in a web page / another application is another plus when using Zoho Show)
How to embed reports in Zoho Show presentations
In Zoho Reports, click on Publish -> Embed in Website/Blog. Copy the html code snippet given. In Zoho Show, click on Insert -> HTML code. Paste the code from Zoho Reports and click on the Insert button. The chart/table will get embedded.
Go on. Create Zoho Show presentations with embedded cool & live reports from Zoho Reports. I'm sure your audience will love it :)
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 :
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). Using the tool, you can easily connect and push data from your databases like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and MS Access
to Zoho Reports. You can schedule data uploads in regular intervals so
that you continue to get near-real-time reports based on your dynamic
data.
As the diagram above shows, the tool works in a simple way. It is a database connector that pulls data from your databases and uploads it to Zoho Reports. Data gets transfered securely over the Internet to Zoho Reports using a secured connection (HTTPS). You can then create powerful reports and analysis based on the data uploaded. Read more about how to move data from your in-house databases to Zoho Reports.
If you are interested in using Zoho Reports for your business intelligence and reporting needs, do contact us for a personalized demo.
In a typical
organization, most databases are built with data keyed in by different
people. For example, a CRM database will be updated by several sales
reps and each of these reps will have his/her own way of entering
data. It can be 'Road' for some, while others may prefer 'Rd'.
Similarly, it can be Drive or Dr, and CA or California. Such variations slowly corrupt the sanity of
the data and can make it unsuitable for reliable analysis & reporting.
The situation is made all the more worse if the data is aggregated
from multiple data sources where each system follows its own
conventions and processes. To make such data uniform and
credible, periodic data cleansing becomes necessary. Only clean,
sanitized data can provide you reliable inferences when analyzed.
Zoho
Reports now supports a Find & Replace function which makes data
cleansing easy and which results in keeping your data clean. For using
this function, right-click on a column name and choose the Find and Replace option. (you can also invoke the Find and Replace option under the More Options menu too).
Enter the relevant data for Find what and Replace with fields.
All the matching data in the column will get replaced.
Other than with text values as shown above, the Find and Replace also works with date & numerical values. Say a sales rep mistakenly entered data with the year as 2007 instead of 2008 (a pretty common data entry error, especially when a new year arrives), you can easily cleanse such data too.
Hope you like the Find and Replace function useful for your data cleansing job. Try it now in Zoho Reports & let us know your feedback.
Helena Schwenk of Ovum Research has a nice post analyzing LucidEra's failure and what it means for the other SAAS BI players. Helena concludes, The spotlight is now likely to shine very brightly on other SaaS BI companies (...) While LucidEra's collapse doesn't necessarily mark the end of SaaS BI as we know it, it could mark the start of a SaaS shift towards larger BI players whose brand and broad portfolios continue to dominate the market.
What Helena points out will certainly happen. The "M" in SMBs, will now look at the smaller, one-product SaaS BI vendors with more caution - and rightly so. But they don't have that many places to look at. The solutions offered by larger BI vendors are typically more expensive and complex and that puts businesses in a bind. They may have to stick with using the good old spreadsheets as their only BI tool (read why spreadsheets aren't that good a choice).
Zoho Reports is bridging the gap by providing a more powerful solution for analyzing data than a spreadsheet or simple pivot table, but not something as complex as a Business Objects implementation. An enterprise opting for Zoho CRM, Mail, Projects, Meeting and other Zoho services can easily take advantage of Zoho Reports for analyzing its data. Its simple, spreadsheet-like interface makes it easy for the users to build, view and share reports. And its various import options allow companies to upload as well as push data from applications or databases behind the firewall easily. Zoho Reports is free as of now and the pricing to be announced soon will be in the lines of other Zoho products - an ample free version accompanied by very affordable pricing plans.
Helena also makes another good point. Customers always want to know that their investments will be safe in the long term. Zoho Corporation serves the technology needs of more than 40,000 customers worldwide. We have been profitable in every year since our inception in 1996. Customers who are looking for a stable BI partner who is investing in an easy-to-use, reliable BI platform for the long-term will find an excellent tool in Zoho Reports.
We posted about enhancements done to the pivot table recently in Zoho Reports. Here's more. Pivot tables (and charts, filters) now support quarterly and weekly intervals. This adds to yearly, monthly intervals before. This can be best explained in the sales context. What if you want to know how you did in 1Q 2009 Vs 4Q 2008 (previous quarter) or 1Q 2008 (previous year, same quarter)? Or what if you want to know how you did this week compared to last week or see the trends of the earlier weeks? It is easy now to have reports for such scenarios.
The screenshot above is for the Actual Values - Quarter & Year, sales in various quarters of each year. Seasonal/Cyclic - Quarter option differs from this as it will give the sum of Quarterly Sales summed across years.
Similarly, the Weekly option is available too. Sales figures of different regions for the various weeks in 2008 shown as a Pivot table.
The same quarter & week concepts are available in Charts and Summary Views.
You can also Filter the data using Quarter and Week timelines.
Try the new Quarterly & Weekly options in Zoho Reports and let us know your feedback in the comments.
Related Links
In Zoho Reports (Zoho DB & Reports service to be renamed as Zoho Reports soon...), we have rolled out Folders support to organize the reports you create in a better way. Also, to enable better navigation we now have 'Explorer' (Windows Explorer like) tab, which provides a detailed view of each report and tables present in a database. Explorer tab will be the default tab that would be shown when you open a database.
Highlighting features of Folders include:
Hope you find this useful to organize your reports better. Give it a try and let us know your feedbacks.
Clarence
Zoho Reports - Online Reporting and Business Intelligence
You might recall the Beijing Olympics 2008 Dashboard that we did recently using Zoho DB & Reports, which was well received. Coming to know about Zoho DB & Reports through this Dashboard, we were contacted by the Official website hosting partner of Commonwealth Youth Games 2008, which is currently being held in Pune, India between 12th-18th October 2008.
They offered us the opportunity to host the Official Reports and Statistics of the Youth Commonwealth Games 2008 in their Website using Zoho DB & Reports. We readily accepted the invitation and worked with them to bring out the Reports and Statistics of the games using Zoho DB & Reports.
Checkout the same @ http://www.cygpune2008.com/graphical-reports/cygpune2008-report.php.
Games official website: http://www.cygpune2008.com (Navigate to the "Results Statistics"" section from the home page to view the reports)
We would like to thank Dimakh Consultants, the official website hosting partner of Commonwealth Youth Games 2008 for providing this opportunity.
Hope you like it. Lets us know your feedback's on the same. Also feel free to contact us (support at zohodb dot com), in case you require any help in solving your reporting needs of your business using Zoho DB & Reports. We would be more than happy to help you out.
Thanks,
Clarence
Zoho DB & Reports - Online Reporting & BI Service
Integrating the powerful reporting & analytics functionality of Zoho DB & Reports into Zoho Creator has been one of the most requested feature. We have heard it and enabled the first step towards this goal.
In Zoho DB & Reports we have introduced the feature of scheduled periodic import of CSV files from any accessible Web URL. With this feature you could setup Zoho DB & Reports to periodically fetch data in CSV format from any accessible Web URL. This would be really useful in scenarios where you have new data being published or updated periodically and you would like get those updates inside Zoho DB & Reports for reporting and analysis. Till now you had to re-import this data manually into Zoho DB & Reports, every time an update is available. Now you just have to setup up the periodic import feature and Zoho DB & Reports would do the rest for you.
With this feature you could also (enable Zoho DB & Reports to) periodically fetch data from your Zoho Creator Application into Zoho DB & Reports as changes happen to the same. As the latest data is made available inside Zoho DB & Reports, you could create any type of powerful reports with it. The reports created using Zoho DB & Reports could also be embedded back inside your Zoho Creator application using the new HTML Page view feature introduced in Zoho Creator 3.0
The following presentation demonstrates how you could periodically import data from Zoho Creator into Zoho DB & Reports:
Do give the above feature a try and let us know your feedbacks. This is just the first step in making available the powerful reporting functionality of Zoho DB & Reports to Zoho Creator users. We are continuing our work on this problem to further simplify the process. A much closer GUI level integration of making report creation features of Zoho DB & Reports available within Zoho Creator is in development. We will keep you posted once we are ready with it...
Happy Reporting and Keep tab on further development...
Olympic fever has gripped many of us. This edition could provide a much closer finish at the top of the table with China and USA running head-head. China being the host nation, could have the home advantage to topple US leadership this Olympics. Anyway lets wait and watch....
Some of the Olympics enthusiasts here at Zoho thought about building a Live Olympics 2008 Dashboard for a quick preview of the latest trends. We used Zoho DB & Reports to upload the latest Olympics results periodically and built some insightful reports. We designed a live dashboard using Zoho Wiki collating some of the top reports created. You can access this @ http://olympics2008.wiki.zoho.com
Some of the reports available:
1. Day by Day Medal progress in Olympics 2008 of top performing countries
2. China vs USA head-head comparison
3. Top 7 countries - By Overall Medal count, By Men Event Winners, By Women Event Winners
4. Performance of a Country when being a Olympics Host vs as Non Host
5. many more...
You can also access the entire public Olympic 2008 database done in Zoho DB & Reports.
So just bookmark the Olympics Dashboard, keep track of the progress and enjoy the games.....
Zoho DB & Reports offers a wide range of data types (column types) to store your tabular data. So far, the options offered for formatting the data stored in these column types have been limited. We have addressed this in our latest update.
Zoho DB & Reports now offers a wide variety of formatting options for each data type. With these options you can choose how you would like to have your data displayed in the various reports created.
How to format a column?
Immediately you will see the formatting options being applied over the column. Zoho DB & Reports also ensures to carry over this formatting set for a column across all the reports (chart, pivot, summary & tabular) created including this column.
Formatting options supported include Text Alignment, No. of Decimal places (for all numeric data types), Currency Symbol (for currency type), Negative Number Display (for currency type), Date display format and Include thousand separator (for all numeric data types).
Customize Chart Coloring:
In Zoho DB & Reports the colors used in charts have been system generated so far. With the latest update you can now change the colors used in a chart to suit your taste. Follow the below given simple steps to customize the color in a chart:
Auto-recognizing currency data during Import:
Now Zoho DB & Reports has included the intelligence to auto-identify a data column as currency when you import it into Zoho DB & Reports. You do not have to manually set the data type of those columns as currency, which had been the case so far. The data could be in any of the accepted currency formats (with currency symbol or abbreviation eg., $, USD etc.,) of any country. Auto-recognition would be applied when you import data into Zoho DB & Reports from any of CSV or .XLS or HTML files
Hope you find the above features useful. As always do give it a try and let us know your comments.
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