Hello!

I would say a lot depends on the type of report - if you are doing an inventory report to cross-check the physical inventory stored at a remote location, the report can run into hundreds of pages!

I will talk about some personal experiences that I had (twice) about 10-15years ago. One was during the Y2K issue and the other during a data migration that we were doing in the good old systems of mainframe COBOL!

I remember doing table dumps on huge line printers of both old and new tables. Team members would face each other on a table, use a ruler and a marker and read aloud the before & after data to compare. Huge coffee pots later, the data would finally tally, and we would call the migration a success. (This is in the days when the servers were mainframes and workstations could be P1, 486 or even dumb-terminals).

The reason I remembered these incidents is because we used to deal with huge stacks of paper as thick as the one shown in the image of the line printer on the editorial. Those printers sure made a lot of noise, but were lightning fast!

In the current times, BI-based analytical data has started becoming more and more significant, and aggregated data is what is most often the requirement for display on a report. However, we do come across requirements where a schedule for the entire month is to be printed by a hotel for housekeeping purposes or by a company for delivery scheduling and production planning.

However, with the green revolution, the most important business requirement that we now get from our customers is to keep them restricted in a single page - you can use abbreviations, colours, etc - but as far as possible the report must not be more than an A4/letter page.