What is the difference between ad hoc and canned reports

Ad-hoc reporting is a model of business intelligence BI in which reports are built and distributed by nontechnical business intelligence users. In other words, with ad-hoc reporting, all the technical user does is set up the BI solution, connect it to the data-sources, establish security parameters and determine which objects end-users can see.

From that point on, the actual reports are created by business end-users. Naturally, ad-hoc reports can be and look as simple as a one page data table or as complex and rich as interactive tabular or cross-tab reports with drill-down and visualization features —or present themselves in the form of dashboards, heat maps, or other more advanced forms. The same applies to paid ads and backlinks. The data that is displayed needs to be traced back and show which of your advertising options yields the most positive results.

This tells which area you should focus on in the future campaign, and what you can eliminate as future costs since it's not as effective. Business users primarily focus on efficiency, and the idea behind regular reports is to allow them to maximize their efforts while minimizing the costs. To sum up, canned reports are a key factor in BI.

The report needs to answer all of the stakeholders' queries and basically tell them if things are going the way it was intended. It is a way of reporting that needs to follow a specific report template which may require an extensive transformation of business data. The report also often needs to include multiple sources of data which is why a lot of specific information tends to get filtered out in the final report. In order to get a more detailed overview of a situation and examine inputs that occurred in a specific time frame, you can use ad hoc reporting.

This report is a great way to see the impact of isolated instances and then analyze how they impacted the final outcomes. This is why both reporting mechanisms are important for relevant data discovery.

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For example, a sales manager might want to know which of his team members is selling the most products, while a marketing manager would be more interested in knowing which piece of content is capturing the most leads. Only when you know what your audience wants will you be able to design a report that provides benefits for them.

Ensure that you indicate whether a KPI is good or bad in some way. One common practice is to compare actual values to the expected values, such as revenue for a particular time-period. You should also use metrics with which your audience is familiar when deciding how to display data on a report.

Sort order, grouping scheme, and filtering criteria are all important considerations in report design because they reduce the amount of data the viewer must process. The layout is especially important for preventing managers from becoming overwhelmed because it can lead to decision fatigue. One good way to do this is to limit the number of KPIs in a single report to six. You can still display more than six data elements in total, but you need to establish a hierarchy of their visual importance when selecting your layout.

KPIs should occupy the most important positions in the layout, with other elements occupying second and tertiary positions. Modern reporting software allows you to design your own dashboards, which should become valuable assets for designing the layouts of online reports.

Aggregate data points like total sales in a quarter should be easily accessible throughout the report. One strategy for calling attention to aggregate data is to display it separately from the body of the report such as an executive or section summary. These summaries typically appear at the beginning of a report, which is a better location for aggregate data than the bottom. Users should also be able to access details on aggregate data directly from the summary. In this case, you should place these details on the same page or peer page instead of a lower page in the reporting hierarchy.

Additional methods of making aggregate data accessible include the use of inline highlighting for this information, especially for large tables. This technique typically involves the use of bold font and different colors, although this may not work well with some fonts or readers with deficient color vision. Graphical displays of information in the left margin can also help readers locate aggregate data more easily.

Effective data visualization requires the report to have a consistent appearance for all pages. These elements also need to be balanced on each page to make the information more easily digestible. Hello, I was wondering if someone can help me understand the difference between ad hoc vs. What do they mean by those? I'm going to be doing reports development for my unit, and between my team and my users, I think there is some confusion as to which is which, and the purposes for each. So I thought I'd reach out to the group for some clarification.

Canned reports normally means reports that are complete and ready to run. Or possibly run overnight. They are dashboards, standard reports. PDFs and exports. They are reports that run daily, weekly, monthly and don't change. Ad-Hoc reports are normally created when someone has a specific request.