Zoho Reports: Email your Business Dashboards as PDF

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Arvind

Creating business dashboards have always been easy with Zoho Reports. Dashboards thus created can be shared and accessed from web URLs. But you may have clients (or colleagues) who would like to view the dashboards as PDF files. Now, how nice would it be if your dashboards were to be emailed as beautifully formatted PDFs with your own company’s logo?

Till recently, it was possible only for individual reports to be exported/mailed as PDF. Now, dashboards can be exported/emailed as PDF too.

You can even schedule the dashboard PDF files to be emailed at regular intervals using the scheduled emailing of reports feature.

Note: The PDF generation is optimized for charts. Just make sure that the dashboards you convert as PDF don’t contain large data tables.…

Case Study: Measuring Marketing Effectiveness with Zoho Reports

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Arvind

An important part of every marketer’s job is to know how each of his/her campaigns are performing. “What’s the ROI (return on investment) from this campaign?” is a question in every marketer’s mind. Based on that, the marketer proceeds with making decisions on which campaigns to continue and which ones to stop.

Chris Swanson is the owner of BMA Marketing, a firm that manages paper coupon programs for bowling centers. As a marketer, Chris was interested in knowing the returns each of his campaigns generate. He not only studies the returns, but also shares the info transparently with all his clients. This is crucial for his clients as they get to know how the coupon campaign that Chris is running for them is performing.

For analysis and easy sharing of the marketing campaign info, Chris tried various options but each had their own difficulties.…

Visualize your data better: Conditional formatting and more!

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Arvind

A chart makes it easy to see a trend over time or to compare how different figures stack up. To achieve a similar effect with plain tabular data is difficult, but not impossible! That’s what conditional formatting in Zoho Reports achieves.

Conditional Formatting of Tabular Data

You often see conditional formatting applied to financial data, where positive values are typically in green and negative values in red. A similar example below, where we show the best ‘CTR’s in green, the bad ones in red and the intermediate ones in yellow. You can apply color to the cell background and to the font (‘Clicks’ column in the below example).

Definitely easy to identify outliers and easy to comprehend, right? Zoho Reports now supports conditional formatting in base tables and query tables. We will be extending it to pivot and summary tables soon.…

Stay on Top of your Numbers With Scheduled Reports

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Arvind

So, you have brought in all the relevant data from the diverse business applications you use, into Zoho Reports, and created all those beautiful reports and dashboards. Now comes the hardest part. How do you share them with your colleagues/clients and make them consume the reports/dashboards regularly? This is where scheduled emailing of reports comes in handy.

You can create appropriate schedules based on the reports you need to share. Say, you can create a schedule that will mail a bunch of monthly reports to your CEO every first of the month. Or a weekly report on every Monday to your Sales Manager of how the previous week’s sales have been.

There are lots of schedule options available, ranging from daily to weekly to monthly to yearly.

Try the scheduling feature from the Export menu button. Hope you will be scheduling all the reports you have created in Zoho Reports from now on.…

Zoho Reports: Cascading User Filters

Posted on 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. Then, as you first created your user filter, it may have dawned on you about how it works and how useful it is for the viewers of a report.…

Dashboard: US Economic Indicators

Posted on 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. The whole reporting database is available here.…