Create Dynamic Reports and Dashboards in Zoho Analytics

Zoho Analytics (formerly called Zoho Reports) is a self-service business intelligence and reporting platform that helps organizations mine and extract critical information from large volumes of data. With Zoho's reporting software, users can fetch data from a wide variety of sources, like files, databases, and business applications, create powerful reports and dashboards, and share it in different mediums for wider consumption.

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Why Choose Zoho Analytics for Building Reports?

  • Wide Range of Report types: Zoho Analytics, Zoho's reporting tool offers an extensive variety of report types like Charts, Pivot tables, Tabular, and Summary view, enabling users to choose the appropriate report type based on the data.
  • Intuitive Interface: The drag and drop designer interface simplifies the report creation process, allowing users to build reports with ease.
  • Pre-built reports: Business app analytics like CRM, Marketing, Helpdesk, Project management, and Social Media come with prebuilt reports, making data analysis easier. Custom reports can also be built with a few simple clicks.
  • Highly Customizable: Each report type has a lot of customizable options like axes configuration, thresholds, the color palette to be applied, legend positions, and much more.
  • Rich Interactive elements: Static reports can make it difficult to comprehend the information. Interactive elements like tooltips provide contextual information about the report; drill downs help explore data at different levels of granularity.
  • Advanced Analytical Methods: Zoho Analytics offers a suite of advanced analytical methods like predictive analysis, anomaly detection, and cluster analysis, all seamlessly integrated into the reporting capabilities.
  • Seamless Collaboration: The reports created in Zoho Analytics can be shared in a variety of file formats, embed reports or dashboards in blogs, and craft immersive presentations to communicate the story in the data effectively.

Types of Zoho Analytics' Reports

Charts

Charts are the key elements to understand the complex information in the data. A chart is a representation of data in the form of graphs and maps. It helps understand the trends and relationships in the data. Zoho Analytics offers over 75+ visualization types to cater to various data analytical needs.

Creating a New Chart | Applying Filters | Customizing a Chart | Working with Charts | Chart Types Primer

Pivot Tables

Pivot Table allows you to dynamically rearrange, group and summarize data for easy analysis of large sets of data. You can filter, sort and customize the appearance and content of your Pivot Table the way you want it, by using a wide range of options provided by Zoho Analytics. 

Creating a New Pivot Table | Customizing a Pivot Table | Working with Pivot Tables

Summary View

Summary View enables you to view your summarized data in tabular formats. This report is extremely useful when you need to analyze a huge amount of data with logical grouping and appropriate summarizations in a visually intuitive manner.

Creating a Summary View | Customizing a Summary View | Working with a Summary View

Tabular View

Tabular View will help you display data in a simple tabular format. Using this, you can create a spreadsheet-like custom report that contains your data. You can see your raw data along with summaries and grouping.

Creating a New Tabular View | Working with a Tabular View

Dashboards

A Dashboard is an effective way of organizing reports into a single page to have a quick insight into the Key Metrics at a glance. You can easily create a visually rich and interactive dashboard by adding reports, widgets, user filters and rich-formatted text in single or double column layout.

Creating a Dashboard | KPI Widgets lWorking with Dashboards

Tips for Creating Compelling Reports

Identify the purpose

Data becomes truly valuable only when it is effectively visualized. So, before building a custom report or a visualization, it is important to ascertain what answer is sought from the data. Effective visualization serves as a bridge between raw data and actionable insights.

Ensure Data Quality

High quality data not only facilitates easier analysis but also improves accuracy. Remove duplicate or irrelevant records that can negatively impact the analysis. Rectify structural errors and ensure a standardized format. Use advanced data transformation functions to prepare the data.

Choose the Right Report Type or Visualization 

With so many report types available for visualization, choosing the right report is tedious. Selecting an ideal visualization for analysis relies on the properties of the data and the specific information you aim to convey. We have listed the different types of information that can be visualized and the corresponding report types.

  • Comparison
    Comparison involves evaluating and finding the similarities or differences between entities (metrics and dimensions). This is one of the most fundamental categories in data analysis. Comparison analysis helps spot deviations and understand change over time, like how a particular metric has changed over a period of time. Chart types like line, bar, area, and pivot table are the best-suited report types for this purpose.
  • Relationship
    This involves understanding the relationship between the metrics or variables. Scatter plot and bubble plot can be used based on the variables, and heat maps can be used for visualizing correlation.
  • Composition
    Composition helps understand how individual segments of data contribute to the whole. This is one of the traditionally used visualizations. Chart types like pie charts, tree maps, and stacked bar charts are the best reports for visualizing composition.
  • Distribution
    Distribution helps understand how values of a metric or a variable are spread or distributed across different intervals or categories. Histograms are best suited to visualize the frequency distribution of a single variable across categories and scatter 
  • Flow
    Understanding the movement or flow of data through a process or phase is an important category of visualization. For instance, leads to sales conversion and progression of customers in a website. Chart types like Funnel and Sankey are best suited for this purpose.

Keep it simple

Make the Zoho Analytics' reports easy to understand and interpret. Avoid adding too much information to a single report; instead, focus on the key insight you wish to communicate. Maintain a consistent visual style by using the same color scheme, format, and font throughout to create a unified appearance. Include context and interactive elements to assist users in data comprehension.