To swing the board, Steve needed an accurate way of presenting the revenue increase from their new app. With one click, he printed their latest sales summary and two hours later walked out with the approval he wanted.
You might have the latest in survey technology, an intelligent iPhone application or a well-designed sales funnel. To maximise the potential of all the data you’ve gathered, you need some way of analysing this data.
In most organisations, you aren’t the only person that will be analysing this data. If you export a sales summary of the hundreds of widgets you’ve been selling over the last quarter, you’ll want to be showing the steep growth in sales to your superiors.
You could want to give a client the data that they’ve collected in a format that they can easily read, so that they can take action on it. You could even just want an automatically generated invoice to be delivered when they buy one of your latest widgets!
One tool that is very commonly used for this is the simple PDF report. We’ve all seen PDF files flying around organisations. Easily emailed, and unchangeable once they’ve been produced, a PDF report is a great way to show others the information you’ve gathered. It might not be the most interactive format, but for easily sharing information about the data, there’s no beating it.
Pros:
- Ubiquitous: Almost everyone has a PDF reader installed. If you aren’t sure if you do, or just want to see a little sample of how this might work, try our little demo here.
- Printable: The PDF document was originally designed to have a format that would look exactly the same on paper as it does on the screen. As a result, the report that the application generates can be printed out and taken into an important meeting without needing to convert anything!
Cons:
- Uneditable: While it can be nice to edit that nobody you send the file to can edit it, it can also be an irritant if you want to operate on the data. Sometimes, it’s better to export the data as a spreadsheet report, so that people can play with the data, apply their own formulae and draw their own conclusions.
Did you know: You can embed images in a PDF file easily. This means that instead of just giving pages of text, or tables of data, you can easily produce a PDF file consisting of some graphs, with just the right amount of descriptive text! A PDF is usually perfect for a summary report.
