WorkGuru uses pivot style reports to allow you to fully display, refine and customise any report. The pivot reports may look complex at a glance, but are very easy to use once you understand the process required to view the data you are chasing. Using the pivot reports successfully is a 3 step process:
Overview
The general elements of a report are listed below, taken from a screenshot of the Purchase Order Summaries by Issue Date Report. The same principles can be applied to the other pivot table reports.
- Report Filters and Actions - This area contains the date or date-range filters (report-dependant) as well as the actions buttons to run or save a report. The 'Date Range' dropdown is optional and will set the start/end date values automatically according to your selection. For details on saving a custom report, please see this support article.
- Report Description - This area contains a description and additional information for the reports contents. The description is user-defined for custom saved reports.
- Report Toolbar - This bar contains various actions to change the appearance or export the report. Specific details on this can be found below.
- Report Fields - This row contains all the fields available to be used on the report. To add a field to the report, click and drag it from this row to either a row, column or data section. To remove a field from a report, click and drag the field back into this row.
- Data Section - This area contains fields for which the report will display resultant data when run. Results for fields in this section will leverage the pivot table capabilities to automatically sum the resultant data to give subtotals per grouping and a grand total depending on the report actions bar settings. Generally speaking, it's advised to only use fields in this section that return numeric-based data.
- Columns Section - This area contains fields which define the column groupings for resultant data when the report is run.
- Rows Section - This area contains fields which define the row groupings for resultant data when the report is run.
The Report Toolbar allows you to alter the behaviour of the report to suit your needs, as well as providing options for data export:
- Expand/ Collapse All Buttons - These buttons will expand or collapse all row or column groupings to their minimum or maximum levels.
- Subtotal/ Grand total Buttons - These buttons will show or hide the subtotals for groupings defined via the reports rows/ columns, and the grand total as shown at the very bottom and right hand side of the report.
- Export: XLS Format - This button will export your report in XLS format. When opened in Excel, a warning may be displayed which can be safely ignored. This export will be formatted in accordance to the filters and grouping of the report as it exists in your browser. This export requires at least one field in the Data section in order to function.
- Export: CSV Format - This button will export your report in CSV format. Unlike the XLS export, this will contain all the data returned when the report is run, regardless of filters/ groupings.
Running Reports
After clicking 'Run Report', a spinner will appear while your request is being processed. If your request succeeds, the spinner will disappear and the report will be displayed according to it's field setup. Below is the default results for the PO Summaries by Issue Date Report:
Please note:
- If no results are displayed, ensure fields have been added to the report and a relevant date range has been input.
- If your request fails to execute, an error will be displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen.
- Caution should be exercised when running reports for very large timeframes as it's possible to crash the browser tab due to too many returned results.
Manipulating/ Filtering Report Results
Fields can be dragged and dropped between the various row/ column/ data sections to change how the results are grouped and displayed. If the 'expand all' action bar option isn't used, individual report groupings can be expanded by clicking on the chevron against the grouping.
Fields can be clicked on to toggle their ordering between ascending or descending. Filters can be applied against a field by clicking the filter icon to the right of the field name:
Regular expressions can be used for the 'Matches' and 'Does Not Match' operators by clicking the '.*' button in the middle of the filter popup. This can be used to apply multiple filters against the same field:
Below is an example of using a regular expression to return only results for suppliers whose names contain 'engines' or 'comp'. The expression used to achieve this is ^(?=.*\bengines\b)|(?=.*\bcomp\b). This expression can easily be extended to include more terms by copying the pipe-character-onwards and appending to the end:
|(?=.*\bYOUR_SEARCH_TERM_HERE\b)
Full Result Set | Filtered Result Set using Regular Expressions |
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