AHR How-To: Use Ad Hoc Reporting

Summary:

This article gives details on how to set up and use Solver's Ad Hoc Reporting (previously called Composer) feature in the Cloud portal. Ad Hoc Reporting provides users with a controlled grid to drag and drop fields from their Data Warehouse for quick data analysis. Ad Hoc Reporting is convenient for users who quickly need to analyze data without having to go through the report creation process. Ad Hoc Reporting is currently supported for the Data Warehouse only within Cloud portal.

Article Sections:

• Method:
  • Setup
  • Create Your First Ad Hoc Report
  • Additional Options
  • Rename and Delete a Saved Ad Hoc Report
• Properties

Method:

Ad Hoc Reporting offers the following:

• Drag and Drop functionality to quickly retrieve and analyze data.
  • User security is inherited, ensuring the users see only the data they have access to. 
• Saved Ad Hoc reports so you do not have to recreate Ad Hoc reports each time.
• Filtering and Grouping capabilities
• Data formatting including: 
  • Currency symbol
  • Number of decimal places
  • Number of Rows
• Export to Excel
• Auto-refresh capabilities upon making changes to the Ad Hoc report. 
• Pivot (transpose) the data. 

Ad Hoc Reporting does not have the following features:

• Share a saved Ad Hoc report with others. 
• Export and import Ad Hoc saved reports as a "template".
• Export the Saved, Ad Hoc Report to be used as the start of a Report Designer template. 

Ad Hoc Reporting is included as part of your Solver Cloud purchase. The user count is based off the number of Reporting Licenses that have been purchased. 

Setup

Access to Ad Hoc is done via the Settings > Administration > Users/Roles > Permissions Menu. To grant someone permission to use Ad Hoc Reporting, simply enable the feature for that user or role. 

Create Your First Ad Hoc Report

Creating an Ad Hoc Report is simple. 

1. Navigate to the Ad Hoc Reports menu. A listing of any saved Ad Hoc Reports will appear.
   
2. If you have never used Ad Hoc Reporting, click the Get Started option. If you have saved Ad Hoc reports, click New in the upper left-hand corner to begin creating your first report.
   
3. Ad Hoc Reporting will load with the following grids  will appear with the following 
   
   
   1. Main data grid.
   2. Filter pane.
   3. Fields pane.
4. Begin by expanding on the modules available to you in the Fields section. Click on the Dimensions and Attributes that you want to be brought into the report. 
   • Dimensions automatically become columns and filters
     
   • Attributes, for both modules and dimensions strictly become columns in the main data grid and are not listed in the Filters grid.
     
     
     By clicking the Checkbox or Filter icons, users can define the properties of this field. 
5. Select as many fields as you'd like and click Refresh in the bottom right-hand corner of the data grid. 
   
6. The data grid populates with the data that you have requested. 
   • The filters pane shows all fields that have been defined as a filter. No filters have been applied by default 
   • The fields pane shows all selected fields. 
7. To apply a filter, click on the field that you'd like to apply a filter to 
   
8. A listing of the codes associated with that dimension appear. Scroll through the list, selecting the codes you'd like to filter for.
9. Click Refresh to apply the filters. 
10. Drag a column label to the "Drag here to set row groups" area to apply a grouping based off the label selected. In the screenshot below, we are dragging Entity into the above mentioned area, which will result in our data being grouped by Entity once refreshed.
    
    
    
11. Export gives you the option to export this data to Excel.
12. Pivot will transpose the data by the data found in the first column.
13. If you'd like to save this report for future use, click Save in the upper right-hand corner. 

Additional Options

Ad Hoc Reporting comes with the following additional options found by clicking the Gear icon in the upper right hand corner. 

Report

• Number in thousands - disabled by default
• Show Currency Symbol - enabled by default

Global

• Auto Refresh - automatically refreshes the report each time a change is made.
• For larger data sets, it is advised to keep this disabled. 
• Row Limit - by default, this is set to 10,000 but can be increased to several different options.
• The larger the selection, the longer it may take to render the results. 

Rename and Delete a Saved Ad Hoc Report

The options to delete or rename a saved Ad Hoc report can be found by clicking the kebab icon to the far right of the saved Ad Hoc report. 

Properties:

Ad Hoc Reporting

Cloud