In most
organizations, many information consumers need reports from business
data, but relatively few people understand the data structures necessary
to build the reports. SAS Web Report Studio bypasses the need to understand
complex data structures. SAS Web Report Studio provides an intuitive
user interface that enables users at all technical skill levels to
create, view, and explore centrally stored reports.
Specially prepared
information maps (called data sources in SAS Web Report Studio) provide
a metadata (information) layer between the nontechnical business user
and the complexities of databases and query languages. Data sources
contain data items, which can refer to calculations or physical data.
Data items are described in common business terms that enable both
casual and professional report authors to easily build queries that
return consistent results. Reports can include query results from
more than one data source.
The casual report author
can use the five-step Report Wizard to design a basic report layout
with one table and one graph. More advanced report authors can use
the full-featured report editor to design more complex layouts, choosing
from two different types of tables and seven different types of graphs.
In addition, headers, footers, images, and text can be used to include
corporate standards, confidentiality messages, and even hyperlinks
in the report. Reports can contain multiple sections. Reports can
be rendered as needed for one-time use or stored in a common repository
for personal or shared access.
Report authors can
design reports that, by default, filter, rank, and highlight the query
results based on specified conditions. These features and more also
are available to report viewers, who can select options from menus
and toolbars to customize the default output. Additional options that
can help you analyze report data include drilling and expanding, sorting,
and creating percent of total calculations.
Other basic reporting tasks include printing, copying,
moving, and exporting. Advanced tasks include scheduling reports to
run at a specified time and distributing reports via e-mail as a PDF
attachment or as an embedded HTML file.