Introduction to Building professional looking reports in Sharepoint 2010 \\ Speaker - Sabrena McBride,Thierry D'hers

• Here are some notes I made while watching this session
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•  Alot of the introductory part of the talk explained how it took forever to get reports from conception/request to final implementation.
  • The speaker mentioned how in the old SSRS doing just 10 reports would take weeks, doing the 50 that a customer might want would take a year
    • Windward's turnaround is a lot shorter
    • With our product there is no need to make sacrifices
• Why they think they are better:
  • Familiar environment, Ribbon
    • Still in a programming/dev environment, average user would be confused
  • Tables matrices can have colors specified in the table wizard
    • This can all be done in word
  • "Before it would have taken weeks"
    • I agree, the old SSRS was terrible, the new one is a lot better, but still has many limitations and is hard to use.
• Can open reports from sharepoint directly into Report Builder
  • Windward Also does this, it just opens up into office
• Demoed the table wizard,
  • This was a great tool, something we could take some cues from.
  • Easy drag and drop to make a table
  • This is also a great starting point for applying macros to a column, or for making a chart since the dataset for a chart is defined by a table
• Chart Wizard was very intuitive, like excel
• "Subscribe" function notifies anyone when a report changes in sharepoint
  • This is a good feature, should be easy for us to add.
• Can embed reports into a web part and use them as dashboards
  • Windward does this
• They have maps
  • In this speech he just had them pre-made, and they looked great, although he promised to demo them in his next talk, which didn't go too well for him
• Can open dashboard reports in report builder
• They showed Databars and sparklines in tables, these looked really good and were easy to incorporate into the report
• Something they had that was useful was a default image for charts, even though when rendered they looked different,
  • Was good for visually laying stuff out, and knowing where charts were in the report
• Keep making references to how easy Powerpoint is to use, and how they are similar to powerpoint, while still admitting that they are not at all like powerpoint, but close.
• Report Parts
  • Like Windward's User Defined Tags (UDTs)
  • IT can set up charts tables, stored on sharepoint, then they can be dragged/dropped into the report
  • Need SQL Server R2
  • But overall a great feature that is well implemented
• PowerPivot can be used as a datasource for a report
  • Windward can do this too.
• SPLists as datasources
• Big talk about how SSRS respects Pagination rules of PDF and Word
  • PDF output looked terrible, the hard page breaks made the ssrs report look bad
  • In word they just expanded the page size, try printing that ..
• OHH btw, SSRS still wont tell you what line your error is on. That wont be coming the the final release either.