Every one of us is producing data all the time every day. Within a minute, more than 100,000 new data are posted on Weibo, and more than 6 million videos are played on Station B… Such a huge amount of data indicates the era of big data. Understanding data is a necessary skill for everyone.
A few days ago, I saw on Moments that a financial friend of three years was about to quit his job. He said that he used Excel to make all the tables for each monthly report, and he would do them one by one for a whole day. When he looked up, he found that all his colleagues were off work…
He says he never wants to feel the same way again, sometimes working late into the night after the software crashes.
In fact, not only financial staff, but also BI staff like me have ever been more or less confused and felt very weak: there are nearly 20 sub-watches in one watch, and I send a dozen of them to you all at once, and I keep reading and doing them all day long, but in the end the leader still says that you can’t do it.
Summarized down is a variety of excel tables, often is the “set of small table, small table and table appearance” to do reports.
So what’s the problem?
Those who have done data reports know that there are too many and miscellany data sources of reports, one from the other, which makes it difficult to integrate them. If you let go of ridicule, business and reporting tools will be ridiculed for three days and three nights. To summarize, the following four reasons are as follows:
1, Excel report is very easy to get stuck, the data often change easy to cause problems
2. Unable to make reasonable use of reporting tools and insufficient automation
3. There are too many demands for reporting business and the speed of making tables is slow, which makes it impossible to finish every day
4. The report platform lacks management and is useless
But after all, the meaning of ridicule is to solve the problem, it is impossible not to make statements, this life is impossible, then how to solve these problems?
I think there are two ways. The first way is to use Python to automatically input the same information, directly from the database, can be done very quickly, the same can be done with Java and VBA, but this method is suitable for IT people who can code.
For most people, the second approach may be more appropriate, using a professional report visualization tool, such as SmartBi. In fact, report does not equal BI, and report is only a part of BI. In contrast, BI is a large category, and if BI is good, report will not be bad. I’m not going to talk about open source here. To be honest, SmartBi is one of the most mature big data products I’ve ever worked with.
SmartBi, as a big data analysis platform, focuses on self-service analysis and comes with ETL (data extraction, transformation and loading). Front-end business personnel no longer need to communicate with IT personnel, and they can make data reports by themselves. A data visualization report that takes Excel3 hours may take SmartBI 5 minutes.
Here, I’ll take Smart Bi as an example to show you how we can use tools to reduce our work and say goodbye to overtime!
I. BI system
BI system mainly includes data warehouse/data mart, ETL, data analysis, BI application and other components and implementation process. In the final BI application, in addition to report presentation, there are multi-dimensional analysis, self-help analysis, data mining and other functions.
II. Quick preparation of reports
All we need to do is connect our database in the designer, pull the data out of the library as a self-service data set, create a new dashboard, and drag and drop the data onto the required dimensions to complete a simple report.
This is a much better way to visualize things than you can do with Excel functions or Python.
In SmartBI, complex reports can also be easily dealt with. Through its rich data processing functions, it can not only summarize the data in the indicators, but also do various properties, styles, sorting, filtering and other operations on the table.
III. Differences between Smart Software SmartBI and Reporting Tools
One person said, “I can use common reporting tools, automatically generate the report that the decision maker wants, and then add some dashboards and charts, can’t it? You don’t necessarily need BI. How simple report software is, which is not like BI to plan the data warehouse, to ETL, but also to build a model, much trouble.”
This is about to talk about the future of the development of the report, a simple report like the teller, will soon be eliminated.
For example, after the report tool is connected to the multi-dimensional database, the multi-dimensional analysis operation, drag and drop analysis and self-help analysis can not be realized, and SmartBI can be easily realized.
Fourth, data visualization
Someone else’s chart is so beautiful, how can I not do it? No good and meaningful charts, data again accurate is useless, looking for templates and tutorials to try their own, do for a long time can not do it, simply tired…
In fact, the leadership is tired of seeing the presentation effect of Excel report. They can’t grasp the key point completely. They are all so dense with figures that it is hard to see the growth point of the business.
Smart software SmartBi used for data analysis visualization components including tables, charts, time controls, text controls, tree controls and other diversified types, can provide users with a richer choice, but also provide a rich interface, convenient for some customization requirements.
And look at its visual cockpit:
