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.
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
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.
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