How often do we try to force a reporting tool to meet a challenge for which it is not well suited? For example, it's not uncommon to witness a user who exports a Sales Transaction SmartList containing thousands of rows into Excel, then uses Excel formulas to summarize the values from that record-set, plugs the end-result into a single cell into yet another spreadsheet, only to have to repeat this process for several other values. All of this for a single Summary Sales Report by Division that's out of date the minute the data is exported to Excel! Rather than continue to waste productive hours watching a SmartList export to Excel on a regular basis, it may be time to consider other reporting tools such as Excel Reports—which refresh SmartList data directly to Excel or Analysis Cubes, which provides support for Excel based dashboards—to meet the needs of our report user.
In the end, our goal with this book has been to reduce potential frustrations that are...
