Informer Reports & Visuals
Visualize Data in New Ways
To ensure your competitive position remains solid, it’s critical to optimize performance by having access to the data you need for business intelligence and being able to easily analyze that data from different perspectives. Informer makes this easy by providing a variety of different interactive data analysis report types that are also convenient to embed in external applications and websites for collaboration. For example:
- Dashboard
- Comparison Board
- Data View
- Ad-hoc Query
Dashboard Reporting Made Easy
Informer Dashboards make it easy for everyone in your organization to make data-driven decisions, optimize efficiency, and accelerate bottom-line results by quickly and easily delivering the right information to the right users at the right time. Now you can view, interact with, and personalize your data visualization software to analyze information coming from multiple sources and improve decision-making across your organization.
With Informer’s intuitive and interactive interface, non-technical users can easily explore data visually and conduct data analysis by creating customized Dashboard Reports on their own. Because Informer Dashboards are dynamic in nature, you can quickly change your filter criteria, chart type, intervals, and drill down into the details for a deeper understanding. Maybe you want to see a map of all your sales orders to identify strong and weak markets with supporting visuals on one screen.
See Figure 1 for a classic Dashboard Report.
Choose the design and layout of your Dashboard Reports. Simply drag and drop the Informer Visuals and resize them to highlight particular insights from the data. And, you can always go back to resize your Visuals, change the position of your Visuals, or even add another Dataset.
Informer Dashboards provide data visualization using real-time information and integrating data from multiple databases, data warehouses, and spreadsheets, whether on-premise or in the cloud, to display all KPIs and metrics from a single web-based interface. Informer’s advanced built-in security framework also supports your data governance parameters by including role-based user permissions and granular data access control.
Orders Dashboards
Informer Dashboard Features Include:
- Create Dashboard Reports that integrate data from multiple data sources including:
- Data warehouses
- Microsoft® SQL Server
- Informix®
- Oracle®
- IBM DB2®
- MySQL
- U2™
- Google Docs
- Excel, and more
- Develop Dashboard Reporting using an intuitive drag and drop web-based interface
- Data visualization with multiple Reports on one screen to provide data context and deeper understanding
- Drill down into the details of marketing Dashboards to answer specific questions
- Specify filter parameters and KPIs on the fly using run-time variables
- Dashboard visuals refresh automatically with real-time data rendering
- Available library of data visuals or customize your own
There are Six Different Visual Options You Can Choose from:
- Discover – Informer automatically creates different Visuals based on the Field types you select
- Saved Visuals – Choose from a list of saved Visuals created in your Dataset
- Charts – Chart Visuals are one of the Visual options for Datasets, Dashboard Reports, and Comparison Board Reports. Charts take data from a Dataset and create graph-like Visuals that you can customize. You can drill down on visuals to create a pivot view for any piece of the visual.
- Choose from a list of different Chart types that can all be used to show multiple aggregates in the same chart, for example: Trend, Pie, Column, Bar, Area, Line, Spline, Area Spline, Scatter, Scatter Plot
- Grouped pie charts can be created by specifying a “split by” field
- Donut charts can be created by specifying a donut radius on any pie chart
- KPI – This displays one large aggregate value of your choice
- Maps – Based on what you are selecting to show, Informer can automatically show heat maps and geographic maps including country maps and state maps down to the county level. Informer 5 uses Google Maps to aid in presenting location data. This enhances Informer’s ability to provide useful and easily understandable data concerning geographic regions across the globe
- Tables – Displays your data in a table format where you can specifically customize the values and limits of rows and columns
Comparison Boards for Faster Data Analysis
A Comparison Board is a collection of Visuals comparing segments of data against others or against the whole. These are very helpful for data analysis where you want to compare multiple options and make complex decisions simpler. Sourced from one or more Datasets, a Comparison Board typically presents Visuals of easily segmented data in a vertically organized, side-by-side display, such as Year-over-Year Sales by Salesperson.
Supporting a multiple column format, to compare left-column Visuals with right-column Visuals, Informer will present a list of Field types from your Dataset. After you choose a Field and a condition to compare Visuals (distinct values, like, enter value, is empty, is not empty, etc.), you’ll see your Visuals screen immediately display a comparison. See Figure 2: Comparison Dashboard.
Data Views for Summary & Pivot Style Analytics
Data Views are used to create cross-tab summary data including aggregates and drill-down details. Sourced from a single Dataset, Data Views provide record-level detail in a familiar spreadsheet type format. You can quickly Filter the Dataset and select specific Fields for Column display and custom formatting. You can create:
- Summary Tables and Pivot Tables
- On-the-fly groups
- Sorts
- Aggregates
- Formatting
Summary Tables and Pivot Tables provide great ways for you to visualize data you might not typically see – leading you to uncover valuable data stories that include exposing operational issues and highlighting opportunities.
With just a few clicks, Informer’s Pivot Tables and Summary Tables make it extremely quick and easy for you to aggregate and summarize information from a large Dataset to get answers to questions.
You don’t need knowledge of Excel. Just select what you want for rows and columns from the list of available Dataset fields and you’ll immediately see your aggregated results. Then have fun further exploring by selecting other field combinations and see the immediate results. See Figures 3 and 4.
To ensure data governance, Data View users only access the resulting grid and Pivot Table. They do not have direct access to the Dataset driving a Data View.
Ad hoc Query for Monitoring Data at the Datasource
Although Datasets are the preferred method for working with your data, there may be times you need temporary query results or near-real-time data. In those situations, it may be advantageous for you to tie your query directly to the Datasource. For example, if you are processing a payroll run and you need to see the data as it is right then to make sure everything is in balance. Or, you might want to monitor your data for certain conditions and email an alert to someone if an error occurs. In those cases, an Ad-hoc Query Report can come in handy.
Ad-hoc Queries have:
- Field definitions
- Criteria that limit the results
- Flow Steps defined
- Results with a short life-span
- Results that are only available to the user who ran the Query
- Results that can only be used to generate Pivot Tables
An Ad-hoc Query can be created using either the Query Designer UI or Native SQL statements in the case of SQL-based Datasources. After running the Ad-hoc Query, Informer creates a temporary Result Set that is visible only to the user who ran the Query. You can then interact with the Result Set in the same way you do with Datasets – filter, sort, group, create Pivot Tables, etc.
