Creating reports in a few clicks

Sales Cloud and Engagement Cloud come with some amazing reporting capabilities.  If there is one thing to admit about them though is that they require having taken a training before you can unleash your creativity on them.  Well that is true for all the BI tools except for one.  The BI Composer is there for creating reports in a few clicks only.

The BI Composer has been around since forever in Sales Cloud but I never have gotten to dedicate a blog post to it.  With the new user experience that was given to the BI Composer in release 13A, it just seemed like a perfect moment to give it a proper introduction and share my thoughts on the BI composer.

Getting Started

So the BI Composer is indeed the tool, that allows untrained users, to make reports in a few clicks.

From the navigator, choose ‘Reports and Analytics’ and from there you have 4 options:

1. Browse the reporting catalog and open a report or a dashboard
2. Create a new document with BI Publisher
3. Create a new simple analysis with BI Composer
4. Open the BI engine and use BI Answers to create sophisticated analysis or use BI Delivers to schedule and deliver them by email.

Going with option 3, the BI Composer will immediately ask you to choose a subject area. Choosing which subject area to use in an important decision as it determines what kinds of data is available to make a report, but as I discussed it in a previous blog post, I will not not go any deeper into the choices here.

This post is all about making reporting easy for untrained users, but there is an additional simplification step to be performed to make choosing the subject areas easier too.
Instead of asking untrained users to use one of the many out-of-the-box sophisticated subject areas, simple, reduced custom subject areas can be created that only make limited amounts of information available to such users.

Once a subject area has been chosen, the actual report creation process can start.  Where BI Answers allows complete freedom in how a report is created, the BI composer forces the untrained end user to follow a rigid report creation process, with only limited options and hence can only lead to simple reports.  But that is exactly what you would want to propose to untrained users, right?

Creating reports in a few clicks

From here on, all that an end user has to do is walk through all the steps to create a report.

First, from the chosen subject area, the data fields required for the report need to be selected.  Columns can be renamed here, and drill down capabilities to transactional records in the app can be enabled.

The next step allows you to choose which visualization you would like to use to display your report results.  The choices are very limited from a table, pivot table to a pie and bar cart.

In case you opted to visualize the selected data in a table, a limited number of changes can be made to the table.  Columns can be excluded if you need them for the graph only, a simple prompt can be added or one big table can be split up in multiple smaller tables by defining sections.

And similar choices can be made in case you chose to use a graph also.

Simple filters then can be added and data can be sorted.

And a simple version of conditional formatting can be applied to table data.  Just set 2 values to segment metrics in 3 groups and assign them the colors you want the 3 groups to be highlighted with.

And that is it.  Not a lot of capabilities but would you want an untrained user to do more?

And that is all: creating reports in a few clicks, with only a few choices and everybody should be able to make a report in Sales Cloud and Engagement Cloud