Flow Grids and Flow Charts in Pyramid Analytics 2020.10

2020.10 is the latest release from Pyramid Analytics. It extends the functionality introduced in the major 2020 release. This post highlights some of the major new features.

Flow grids and charts are commonplace in transactional and operational reporting. Many organizations need to report detailed lists of items for users, which go beyond analytic data visualizations.

The flow grid and flow chart tools in Pyramid are designed to dramatically extend the grid and chart capability for publications. They provide dynamic overflow for grids and charts with many rows that don’t ordinarily fit on a single page. Instead, the printing engine facilitates the flow of the extra items to subsequent pages.

The problem

Publications often require the display of multiple lines of data or charts that do not fit on a single page. If the publication can’t be exported to PDF with dynamic overflow, the user must manually export a report into a document, reapply formatting changes, save as a PDF file, and finally, manually distribute it among users.

Some competing BI tools (like Power BI) do not have server-based printing—let alone scheduling and auto-distribution. Getting the transactional reporting component operational is all but impossible. Without these combined capabilities, organizations are required to find yet another data reporting tool to manage “enterprise reporting” and transactional, multi-page outputs.

The solution

Pyramid provides powerful analytic and reporting publications for users via a simple point-and-click selection. This can be scheduled and automatically distributed. The Publish tool now expands on this and includes the ability to dynamically overflow both grids and charts across multiple pages. These combined features are ideal for producing multi-page reports of grids and charts, typically detailing transactional information. The published documents can be exported with pixel-perfect clarity into PDF, PowerPoint, Word, and Excel, among other export options.

Business case

Sylvia, a business analyst at XYZ Retail Inc., is using Pyramid to analyze data from her SAP HANA views and to create dashboards and reports and publish them across the enterprise. Sylvia’s EXCO dashboard must be exported into a PDF file and automatically distributed monthly to the management team. The publication shows expenses for each cost center manager with analytics and charts. There is also a variable list of actual transactions for credit card items billed (that are typically five to ten pages long) for the manager to review. Sylvia would like her publication to print perfectly across multiple pages and dynamically change it based on the transaction volumes.

This is how Sylvia’s grid appears in the publication without the flow grid option activated. Each cost center manager will receive their own PDF via email, with data pertinent to their cost center. Note how the page is truncated as there are too many rows to be printed on a single page.

With a simple point-and-click, Sylvia activates the flow grid option, and the PDF will “overflow” and dynamically print as many pages as required for each cost center, without truncation. Charts have the same flow functionality, enabling multiple charts to overflow on subsequent pages, simplifying the design of publications without having to worry how to fit dynamic charts onto a single page.

Summary

The flow options in Pyramid’s Publish tool provide dynamic overflow for grids and charts for many items that would not fit on a single page. Instead of shrinking a visualization to fit or not publishing detailed data, visualizations can now be spread across multiple pages. Competing tools lack publication or printing options, let alone tools for multi-page overflow visualizations. This means organizations need to purchase separate tools to cater for enterprise reporting and transactional. With Pyramid, the entire enterprise scope for use and distribution of analytics and reporting is handled in a single, integrated, and accessible product.