Something recently occurred to me.  I’ve been researching chart and dashboard design standards for an article I’m working on, and the eventual inclusion in an upcoming book.  Funnel charts are commonly used in the sales and customer relationship management (CRM) industry to visualize the volume of leads at various stages… Read more

Last week Donald Farmer announced that he was leaving his long-time position as Microsoft’s lead BI technology evangelist for QlikTech, a small company from Sweden, now based in Pennsylvania; that pioneered in-memory OLAP and analytics.  Microsoft has invested heavily in their own version of in-memory OLAP with PowerPivot and the… Read more

I’ve recently come to realize what a truly remarkable feature it is to be able to format report text using simple HTML tags.  This capability was added to Reporting Services in SQL Server 2008.  Prior to this, all of the text in a textbox could be formatted with a font… Read more

In concept, designing reports is such a simple thing… you connect to a data source, write a SQL query, optimize the query so it runs fast and efficiently, build the report UI and deploy it to the server.  Piece of cake, right?  Not always.  Reporting on simple, normalized data structures… Read more