Best practices to be considered during report development

Some of the best practices that comes to mind right now are listed below, main thing is to think from user's perspective
  • Optimize time taken for report refresh
  • Layout and arrangement of objects (Charts/graphs/grid/tables, logo, header, footer, title and one or two line descriptions, report refresh time, prompts answered by users )
  • Best chart/graph types
  • Prompts/filters that can be provided.
  • Provide good description for each prompt that use can select or provide values.
  • Identify and set best values as default values for prompts
  • Test, modify report and mention which format (Excel or pdf) export works best (if not mentioned in functional requirements)
  • Keep number of pages to minimum possible but ensure that there isn’t too much information in the report because of which user can get confused
  • Use legends, consistent colour coding for same values across reports
  • Spell checks
  • Versioning the report
  • Mention any specific inclusions/exclusion/filter applied
  • Mention from where the data is sourced, and data is valid as of which date.
  • Additionally, based on organizations, you could also mention contact details (for example group email id) of support team for clarifications or to report issues related to the report.


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