Data+ Exam DAO-001 - Lesson 13: Expressing Business Requirements in a Report Format

Consider Audience Needs When Developing a Report

  • The Audience: The individuals who will utilize the data within reports and dashboards.
  • Can be a person or people within a specific role, a department, or even the entire organization.
  • The audience is also the distribution list, i.e., those who receive the report or dashboard.
  • It's important to understand: who the report users are and which individuals will have access to specific types of information.
  • Consumer Types:
    • C-level executives
    • Management
    • External vendors/stakeholders
    • General public
    • Technical experts

Describe Data Source Considerations for Reporting

  • Documenting the Source Data
    • Documentation can be added to the report or included in an appendix.
    • Identify the source of your data.
    • Remember that not everyone will have the same level of data source access as you do as an analyst.
    • When required to develop a new source for your data project from the original source data, you will need to note the source data for your project.
  • Reasons to document the source data:
    • To account for changes in role and prepare others who might take over the work.
    • To speed up resolving issues.
    • To facilitate a return to the project.
    • To answer questions about where the data came from.
  • Determining Access to Data
    • Before you even begin reporting on data, it is important to first gain approval to design the dashboard or report.
    • You must also gain approval to give that dashboard or report to others to use.
    • The approval process varies between organizations, and in some cases even between departments.
    • You will provide data to other users through reporting in several ways depending on their permissions and access to the data.
  • Developing Views of the Data
    • Any time we organize tables and/or query and join them, we are building a data model.
    • A data model organizes the data and the relationships of data.
    • The person who accesses the report will not need to organize the data themselves.
    • You can create views that are available to all people who have access and save it as View.
    • You can then leverage the View when you use tools like Power BI or Tableau for reporting.
    • Building this view eliminates the need to use the data prep tools in these applications because you can model and filter the data beforehand.
  • Data Fields and Attributes
    • Field definitions should be readily available to the audience.
    • Can be a document or a page of the report.
    • Contains pertinent information on the values, calculations, and data set.

Describe Considerations for Delivering Reports and Dashboards

  • Determining How Visuals Will Be Viewed
    • Viewed via a web interface
    • Converted to presentation software
    • Converted to PDF
    • Printed on paper
  • Determining How Data Will Be Delivered
    • In a business setting, data is delivered in several ways.
    • A report, dashboard, or visual is presented in a meeting.
    • Information is delivered as a part of a data section on the company website.
    • Data is shared in the "report sharing" option of software applications like Power BI or Tableau.
    • Data can be printed as a paper report.
    • Data can be subscribed to through the subscription.
  • Frequency of Reporting
    • A key part of developing business requirements for data and reporting is determining:
      • how often reports should be updated
      • how often they should be sent.
    • Even if it's difficult to control the timing of when data is updated, it is important for the audience to understand that their data is up-to-date as of a certain time, so that there is no misunderstanding about what data is contained within the reports.
  • Recurring Reports
    • A report that is set to repeatedly run on certain dates or at specific times is a recurring report.
    • This schedule will include the following:
      • The report to be sent
      • The output of the report
      • Who will receive the report

Develop Reports or Dashboards

  • Visualization Layouts
    • Data analysts work with three main types of reporting:
      • Dashboards - An interactive, visual display of information.
      • Paginated reports - a multipage report that is not suitable for display on a dashboard.
      • Spreadsheets - a worksheet of data in tabular form
  • Mockup And Wireframing For Design
    • Mockup simply means to draw out a potential layout.
    • Wireframing is creating mockups of multiple screens that are likely connected.
    • These processes are commonly used in user experience (UX) design and user interface (UI) design.
  • Types Of Visuals
    • Table—Displays columns and rows of information in list format
    • Matrix— A matrix shows values at the cross section of a row and column.
    • Graphical visuals (pies, bars, stacked)
    • Cards—Typically used for totals or aggregated values.
  • Types Of Dashboard Navigation

Understand Ways to Sort and Filter Data

  • Sorting Data
    • Data is typically in natural order, meaning the order in which the data is entered.
    • The most common sort method is ascending and descending order, meaning A–Z or Z–A for text-based fields.
    • For numerical data, ascending is the minimum number sorted to the top with descending order being the reverse of that.
    • Multi-sorting is a method of sorting where you sort within a sort.
    • Top N and Bottom N sorts
    • Custom sorts are where you create the data set to include the value and the sort order you need for your visualization.
  • Filter Methods For Visuals
    • Hard-coded filters are coded into the view or the visual.
      • Filters that can hard code a visual, page, or the entire report by whatever field and condition you specify.
    • Interactive filters are filters that allow the consumer to adjust to narrow down the data they want to see.
    • Visuals can also serve as filters.
  • Filtering By Date Ranges