Create your design
The first step for a new report request is to design how your report should look when printed. This can be presented in either Word, Excel or PowerPoint. The focus here is to ensure that the design clearly illustrates your requirements.
Consider the following before you start:
- Should the report be in portrait or landscape? i.e., choosing a portrait layout will impact the number of columns which can be presented in tables, or the number of months which can be displayed on a Gantt chart.
- How should the data be displayed? i.e. in tables, in bar charts, in graphs etc? (see below for some examples)
- If you want data presented in tables, should the column headings repeat on each report page i.e. if the data flows across multiple pages?
- Should your corporate colours or fonts be used? And do you want your logo inserted in the report?
- Do you require headers, footers or page numbers?
Graphs and charts
There are a variety of visuals we can offer for custom reports:
These visuals are similar to those seen in the dynamic dashboards and include:
- Metric tiles
- Doughnut charts
- Pie charts
- Bar charts
- Line graphs
- Stacked bar graphs
If you're unsure of which graph/chart would work best, our report team will be happy to suggest the most appropriate one based on your requirements.
Organising data
As well as considering how your report should look, you also need to think about how the data within it should be organised. For example:
- How should data be listed in a table? i.e. should it be listed in sequential ID order, RAG status order, or due date order etc? And should the order be ascending or descending? So all ‘red’ records first, followed by ‘amber’ and so on.
- How should data be grouped i.e. If it's a aggregated report, should projects be grouped by programme first and then by project RAG statuses? Or should projects be grouped based on which lifecycle stage they are in etc?
Note: The ordering and grouping is hardcoded into the report and can not be changed.