Before you create a document or dashboard, you need to gather information from your user community, your project designer, your database administrator, and your MicroStrategy software. The following best practices are described here:
Ask yourself who the audience is for the document you plan to create. Questions you should have answers to include:
What is the main topic area the document needs to address? In other words, at a general level, what do users need to know?
What level of detail do users need? For example, sometimes executive level users only want to see a few key metrics of certain data. Other analysts may need to see very detailed financial numbers or inventory counts.
What types of documents do users expect? Higher level executives sometimes have expectations about how data is displayed in a document, so it can be helpful to ask what types of documents they are used to receiving and whether it is important to try to adhere to that data display style.
Who is your universe of users made up of?
If your universe of users is extremely diverse, consider making documents as flexible as possible for each user who executes them, by adding prompts. A prompt asks users questions about the results they want to see on a document, and then submits the appropriate query to the data source. For an introduction to prompts, see the MicroStrategy Basic Reporting Guide.
Your
universe of users may include different security requirements. For example,
you may need a single document for a group of users, but that group includes
both external and internal users, and you want to restrict some data from
external view. You must confirm that appropriate security is in place
for a document’s underlying objects, and that security filters are in
place to control row-level access to data. Object-level security is performed
using ACLs (access control lists).
Security filters and ACLs are generally implemented by your system
administrator, but one or both may be under the control of your project
designer. For details on security filters, ACLs, and other security features,
see the MicroStrategy System
Administration Guide.
If you need an introduction to or refresher on data sources, see the MicroStrategy Basic Reporting Guide.
Make sure the data your organization stores can support the information your users want to analyze in a reporting environment. Questions you should ask include:
Does your organization gather the data that users want to see documents on?
Is your
data organized in such a way that it can be used? Is the data reliable,
and is it clean? One way to check on the reliability of your data is to
create some simple grid reports designed to validate whether your data
reflects your understanding of reality.
For example, if you have a good sense of how many customers own two
or three of your organization’s products, create a report that shows basic
data on the count of customers who purchased those specific products over
the past few years. If the numbers you see in the report do not come close
to what you expected to see, it is worthwhile to spend some time with
your database administrator to address the reliability of the data stored
in your data source.
Many of the objects within a project are generally created by the project’s designer when the project is first created. Since you use these objects to design datasets for documents, it can be useful to understand your project’s design, and specifically how the project’s objects reflect the actual data in your organization’s data source. In this way, you can choose objects to use in datasets with full knowledge of the data source tables that data is coming from when the document is executed.
For details on general project design and data modeling, see the MicroStrategy Project Design Guide.
Questions you should ask about your project include:
Do objects
exist in the MicroStrategy metadata which match what users want to see
on documents? If not, a document designer can create them.
MicroStrategy provides flexibility in combining information from your
data source into specific objects which reflect the concepts that make
sense to your users. Consolidations and custom groups are just two examples
of ways you can present data to your users in a way that does not directly
reflect your data source’s storage structure. For an introduction to consolidations
and custom groups, see the MicroStrategy
Advanced Reporting Guide.
What VLDB (Very Large Database) properties have been set? These settings affect how the SQL is written when a document sends a SQL query to your data source. VLDB properties are usually determined by an administrator, but some may also be defined by a project’s designer. All VLDB properties are described in detail in the MicroStrategy System Administration Guide.
What project configuration settings have been set that will affect reports or documents? Ask your project designer about any configuration settings made for the project as a whole, because most reports and report objects revert to the project’s settings when no object-specific or report-specific settings override them.
Before
you create a document, search through MicroStrategy to see whether a similar
document already exists that can serve the same purpose as the document
you intend to create. This can save you time and help you avoid unnecessary
duplication in your MicroStrategy metadata.
You can deploy out-of-the-box documents to your project by reconciling
the documents’ content to your own project objects. For example, you can
use a document or dashboard from the MicroStrategy Tutorial project or
any of the Analytical Modules in your own project. To do this, you use
the portable documents feature. A portable document contains all the design
of the document without the data, allowing you to copy documents between
projects, even when the projects do not have the same metadata. When you
import the document into the replacement project, you map the document
to the new project (referred to as reconciling the document). For instructions
on creating and reconciling portable documents, see the Advanced
Documents chapter of the MicroStrategy
Document Creation Guide.
Before you create the finished document, use Microsoft Excel, Paint, PowerPoint, or another tool to create a mock-up of the document you intend to design. Send the mock-up to your user community to gather their feedback on its usefulness. This can save you valuable time creating a complex, finished document that may have to be redone.
You can select multiple controls on a document so that you can perform an action on all of them, such as formatting, aligning, or sizing. To select multiple controls, press and hold CTRL while you click each control.
Hide unused document sections (by collapsing the section on the template) so that the template is easier to work with. See Hiding and displaying sections.
Use the grouping feature to minimize the amount of data passed between the web server and the browser. This is useful because documents do not use incremental fetch to return data from the server. See Grouping records in a document.
Determine whether the dataset(s) will return a large amount of data. If so, consider adding grouping to the document by choosing which attributes you want to group the pages by. See Grouping records in a document.
Make the following decisions as you are planning the design of your document, not after you are finished:
Determine the logic for page breaks. See Adding page breaks to a document.
Decide what export options you will enable for users of this document. See Exporting a document.
Decide whether you need landscape or vertical orientation to best display the data you want to include. See Modifying page setup options.
If the document will be viewed in PDF, be sure to include bookmarks. See Including bookmarks in PDFs.
Do not include so many graphical objects that the data becomes unimportant. Make sure the data is the main focus of the document. The overall goal is to achieve a clean look.
Plan your design so that all related data can be seen on a single screen or page, and that it can be interpreted from the top left to the bottom right.
Save your document frequently as you design and make formatting changes to it.
While designing your document, preview it in each display mode in which the document will be displayed, to make sure that the document appears as expected in each display mode. For steps to determine which display modes an analyst can use to view the document, see Defining which display modes are available to users.
For additional best practices when designing a dashboard and when using effects and widgets, see Best practices: Designing effective dashboards.
Use the following best practices to ensure that your document will be displayed correctly when exported to Microsoft Excel. For information on how to make export modes available for a document, see Defining which display modes are available to users.
Choose Excel-compatible colors for all objects, including panels, shapes, and Grid/Graphs. Use the set of 40 colors that appear in MicroStrategy Web's Advanced Color Picker. Excel supports these 40 colors in addition to many more. Other colors in MicroStrategy are matched by Microsoft Excel as closely as possible.
Use graph styles that are supported by Microsoft Excel. For example, if you include a Gauge graph in the document, it is not displayed in Excel. If you include a Combination graph, the exported version in Excel may not be displayed exactly like the original graph in MicroStrategy Web.
Avoid overlapping objects. When exported, the document may not be displayed correctly. For example, an object in the background of the document may be displayed in the foreground of the Excel spreadsheet.
Provide extra space around objects because they may increase in size when the document is exported to Excel.
Use text field borders to create line and rectangles. Standard MicroStrategy line and rectangle controls may not be displayed correctly in Excel.
Avoid inserting line breaks within text fields. Line breaks (inserted by typing Ctrl+Enter) are not rendered in Excel.
Do not enable word-wrapping in a column header on a Grid/Graph in MicroStrategy. If you do so, the headers are not displayed correctly in Excel or PDF. Enable word-wrapping in Excel after you export the document.
Use an absolute file path to define the location of an image used in a document. Do not use a relative file path. Images in documents specified with paths relative to MicroStrategy Web and Intelligence Server are not displayed when exported to Excel.
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