Continuing on full steam ahead with agileBase platform development, we have another couple of features to announce this month, to make the system more useful when generating and distributing reports.
Weekly charting
Firstly, when creating a chart, you have the facility to total (or perform other maths such as averaging) data by year, quarter, month or day. We’re now adding a fifth option, by week of the year.
That’s particularly useful if you configure the system to send out weekly reports to people. The charts can then show the past week’s figures, compared to the week before, or the same week last year.
Subscribing to spreadsheets
We all know that spreadsheets are the lingua franca of data. People with the necessary privileges can export to spreadsheet at any time in order to send the data to others who may not have an agileBase login, or to import into other systems like accounts packages for example.
We’ve now made it easier to automate this process. Just as you can subscribe yourself, or a group of people, to receive charts daily, weekly or monthly, you can now include a spreadsheet of raw data with those charts. Recipients will receive two attachments, one PDF containing the charts subscribed to and a second Excel spreadsheet containing the data.
This takes effect automatically when you opt to include data with your charts, if more than the top 20 rows are requested. The data included can optionally be filtered by date, to show just those records added or updated since the last time the data was sent.
Although sharing spreadsheets will work for many, sometimes a more automated solution is beneficial. For example in cases where data is destined to be imported from one system to another, removing the spreadsheet in the middle can reduce manual work and drastically speed things up.
In those situations, we do encourage customers to make use of the comprehensive API capabilities, which will allow you to fully automate integrations with third party systems, such as websites, enterprise-wide reporting, or accounting packages.