ReportSheet

Generating reports is important for creating marketing strategies, travel reports, sales track reports, employee reports, financial reports, order reports, etc. This is a common requirement of any business domain and generally consumes a lot of time, manpower, and effort. ReportSheet is a simple and flexible way of creating complex reports effortlessly. It supports data entry, pagination, data filtering, sorting, conditional formatting, and many more.

To create a ReportSheet, there are two important parts of settings in SpreadJS; TemplateSheet and ReportSheet. A TemplateSheet contains report-related settings, such as layout, formatting, and any other specifications, whereas ReportSheet has settings to load a TemplateSheet and combine it with the data in the data manager to generate the corresponding report. ReportSheet also provides the data entry APIs.

The following diagram shows the core process of ReportSheet and how to fetch data from the server, load it into the DataManager, create a TemplateSheet for the report with relevant report-related settings, and then combine the template with the data in DataManager to generate the corresponding ReportSheet.

You can also insert a ReportSheet in the Spread Designer, by selecting the INSERT tab and then ReportSheet in the Sheets group.

The main benefits of using a ReportSheet are described below:

• Integrated Template and Data Management: Allows seamless integration of report settings and data with the combination of ReportSheet and TemplateSheet. The TemplateSheet holds various report-related settings which ReportSheet utilizes, alongside data from DataManager, to generate corresponding reports efficiently.

• Enhanced Flexibility: Provides highly flexible syntax and API to bind source data. It follows easy data population rules in fields and also provides data entry APIs.

• Ease of Customization: Ensures a standardized format and appearance for all generated reports, maintaining consistency across various data sets.

• Comprehensive Data Handling Features: Manage and present data in a user-friendly manner. ReportSheet is not just about report generation; it's a comprehensive tool that supports data entry, pagination, data filtering, sorting, and conditional formatting.

Let's have a look at different use cases of ReportSheet.

Use case 1: Financial Report

This example shows the budget statistics of different countries for different quarters.

Here, first, define the 'Bud' (Budget) and 'Act' (Actuals) tables in the DataManager. Then, set the style for your report template. The following image depicts a TemplateSheet where cell A1 & D1 contains static data in header cells. The data columns show the country name, year, and time period for which financial data is recorded in the report. The country field is then expanded horizontally to add other countries and vertically to add quarterly details. The SUM() function is used to get totals on the Bud and Act columns.

Further, bind the data with the template created and use specifications like ‘Group' cell type, filter, pin, vertical and horizontal direction spilling, etc to enhance the readability of the generated report and provide a clear structure to it.

The financial report generated from the above TemplateSheet is shown below.

Use case 2: Sales Report

This example shows the regional sales report of individual salesperson with sales of multiple products per region.

In this case, first define the sales table in the DataManager. Then, set the style for your report template. The following image shows a TemplateSheet where the data columns show the regions, salesman names, products, and sales details for which the data is recorded in the report. The SUM() function calculates the total sales in the Sales column.

Now, bind the data column to the template and use the ‘Group' and 'Summary’ cell types.

The sales report generated from the above TemplateSheet is shown below.