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The Excel-like Design Style of Reporting Tool
Posted by: Zhou Feng
Date: February 13, 2009 06:08AM

Designing reports with traditional reporting tools of control drag and drop style, we are often troubled by the alignment of gridlines. Especially when the report has a multi-level complex report header, it has a huge workload and usually can not achieve a perfect effect.
With its unique spreadsheet design style, Excel avoids the trouble of the alignment of gridlines. Therefore, wide end users have a special liking to it, and ask for a reporting tool with an Excel-like design interface.

As a result, many report companies emulated Excel, and they thought the only thing was to add a table control.
However, end users are not so easy to be satisfied with only a table control, and they ask for various design capabilities of Excel. Such as merge/split cells, word wrap, shrink to fit, format painter, etc. Then, cell properties are even more, such as border, background, foreground, font, size, etc.
The ideal requirement of end users is an Excel-like reporting tool with a complete set of report operational models. With it, they can easily make all kinds of reports, no matter simple or complex. Simple report means linear report, such as freestyle report, grid report, group report, cross report, etc. Complex report means nonlinear report, such as multi-source report, irregular group report, symmetrical row/group report, etc. With operational capability, Excel design models will really become end users' favorite design style.

As end users like Excel so much, they may have made a great number of Excel templates before. When they are making reports, they hope that they can import these templates directly to avoid the trouble of designing again. Similarly, they also hope that they can export reports made with reporting tool to Excel templates to make a second operation conveniently.

Above is the relative perfect standard of Excel-like reporting tool. Perhaps some people will say that it is too hard, and there can not be such an ideal tool. Luckily, RAQ Report meets all the requirements above and becomes the leader of the new generation of reporting tools. Of course, besides the perfect Excel-like design style, RAQ Report has many revolutionary functions, such as strong correlation semantics model, multi-source input model, etc.

This post is from freezea's blog. You are welcomed cc it anywhere, and please indicate the source.

If you would like to read more articles about reporting tool, you are also welcome to refer to my blog at http://freezea.blogspot.com/.

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The Excel-like Design Style of Reporting Tool
February 13, 2009 06:08AM


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