Heh... report writers. They're the disdain of many... and I don't know why. What the hell good is data if you can't turn it into information? That's what Report Writers do, from what I can see.

They also have it worse than a lot of other people. If you think the not so proverbial request to move a field one pixel is a PITA, feel the pain of the report writer. It's not a click'n'drag job as most would think. They have to know the data inside and out. They have to know how it's organized so that they can join all the pieces together to make some sense of it all. They have to be able to explain it all to all sorts of people including but not limited to a wide array of auditors whose sole purpose in life is to see if they can find something not quite right. Then there's the boss that want's the report yesterday, the thousand users that want it transferred to their spreadsheets and don't understand why you can't fit 2 million rows on a single sheet, the managers that don't understand that you can't have 5 years of dates on a bar chart that's only 6 inches wide and still be able read each date nor why having a gridline for each date turns the background to solid black or blue, or that a pie chart with a 100 segments really isn't going to do anyone any good or why the blue segments turned green when printed on yellow paper and the yellow segments seemed to disappear, or why you can't print red on a black'n'white printer, or try to explain why it's not a good idea to print a million row report, etc, etc, etc.

Then there's the boss that want's you to fudge numbers "just this one time".

My hat's off to Report Writers and people in BI. They have to support "Business Intelligence", which is frequently an oxymoron. 🙂