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SharePoint Reporting & Business Intelligence in

SharePoint 2013

SQL Reporting Services (SSRS) Pixel Perfect Reporting

If you need a report to be printed to paper, you may want to have very tight control over how the report looks.

This is where SSRS really shines, you have to ability to create pixel perfect reports and control things like page margins and widths.

Scheduled Email Reports If you have reports that need to be emailed on a

schedule, this can be done using SSRS.This is useful if you want a daily or weekly report

emailed and then you can view in on your phone on the way to work.

SQL Reporting Services (SSRS) Export Forms

SSRS supports exporting to many different formats including DOCX, XLSX, PDF, MHTML and many more.

PerformancePoint has some ability to export to XLSX if you go to the Show Details view however it’s nowhere near as robust as the SSRS export functionality. 

GaugesSSRS is the only one that gives you a gauge

control that can then be viewed in SharePoint using Report viewer web part

Static ReportsReports are static and often used to print

reports to paper.

SQL Reporting Services (SSRS)

PowerPivot

Offline database snapshots: Some users would like to go offline and take a

database with them. This is where PowerPivot comes in, you can pull down an entire database (up to 4GB) into one Excel Sheet and then interact with that data as if it were part of a Cube.

The performance is achieved by using the in-memory Vertipaq engine which is able to store the data in RAM rather than reading from a hard disk.

PowerPivot

PowerPivot

Excel Services Pivot Tables

Pivot tables allow you to view a hierarchy of aggregated data. With Excel Services 2013, you can now edit pivot tables right from within the browser.

ChartsThe charting engine of Excel Services is the

best out of all the others. It gives you the most options for formatting, chart types, 2D/3D charts, data labels, and colors.

Lightweight drilldownWhile PerformancePoint is still the best for

drilldown, Excel Services now gives you lightweight drilldown when dealing with data that comes from analysis services

Excel Services Slicers

These are filters that sit on the same page as an excel Chart or PivotTable that allow you to single or multi-select different filters. I have found these to be much more user friendly than PerformancePoint’s filtering options.

Excel Services Works on iPads  

Excel Services is built on HTML and Javascript so it works on any modern browser. Also this is good reason to use Slicers because they are big enough for a finger to click on in a mobile browser.

Data Bars and Heat Maps Data bars are like

mini charts that live inside cells and heat maps give you a relative comparison between data using shades of colors

Works on iPads: Excel Services is built on HTML and Javascript so it works on any modern browser. Also this is good reason to use Slicers because they are big enough for a finger to click on in a mobile browser.Data Bars and Heat Maps: Data bars are like mini charts that live inside cells and heat maps give you a relative comparison between data using shades of colors 

PowerView Designed for end users

PowerView is designed to be an end user ad hoc reporting tool.

You can create on the fly reports based on a defined Tabular Model Cube.

As you create charts and graphs, connections are done for you automatically.

It runs in Silverlight, which in some ways is also a downside because it doesn’t work on mobile devices such as iPads. However as an ad hoc reporting tool it is by far the easiest one for your end users to install, and if they have Silverlight already configured then there is nothing to install.

PowerView Designed for end users

This is in contrast to something like Report Builder which is part of SQL Reporting Services and which requires that the end user install an application locally on their machines using Click Once Technology

GridsOf all the other technologies, if you want to just get a

grid of data from the cube PowerView is the only one that does it.

While Excel Services gives you views into cubes, they need to be viewed in a PivotTable which is only designed to display data in aggregates.

PowerView

PerformancePoint

Advanced DrilldownOf all the technologies, PerformancePoint is the

best at doing drilldowns in complex cubes. While many of the other reporting technologies

will give you the “What”, PerformancePoint is designed to give you the “Why” and when you see something of interest getting drilldowns are very easy to do within the analytic charts and decomposition tree.

PerformancePoint Scorecards and KPI’s

In addition to drilldown, PerformancePoint is the best of the technologies if your reporting is based around a certain goal and you wanted to know whether you hit that goal.

If you didn’t hit the goal, PerformancePoint will give you insights into why with KPI’s that rollup.

Works on iPads: This and Excel Services are

both compatible with mobile devices. For iPads you simply hold your finger down on a PerformancePoint chart for a few seconds toget the drill down options

PerformancePoint Analytic Charts and Grids

The charts and grids built into PerformancePoint are powerful for their interactivity however I would say Excel Services offers a more robust charting engine.

One of the downsides of the PerformancePoint charts is that they don’t give you data labels so you don’t know the exact value of bars and slices in charts without hovering over them with your mouse or by looking at the legend or the axis.

PerformancePoint – What its not PerformancePoint is highly interactive for end

users, but this is not a tool that the end users develop their own reports.

If a user wants a new dashboard created they will likely have to involve IT. 

PerformancePoint is not an ad-hoc reporting tool although it does have some features that allow users to change a reports type and the content it displays. 

The user is limited to what the developer placed on the dashboard as far as filters, KPIs, scorecards, etc…

Also, the dashboards you develop in PerformancePoint are meant for high level reporting so it’s not a great idea to place detail level reports on a dashboard. 

PowerView Reports Can Be Imbedded in PerformancePoint Web Browser

Reporting Services SQL 2016 (Preview of Future)Complete Mobile Integration Desktop

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