Getting to the bottom line
What is a report?
Okay, this may seem like a trite question. However, we ask it with sincerity: What is a report? When the Executive Director, Membership Committee Chair, Fundraising Consultant, Board Secretary, or Staff Supervisor in the next cubicle asks you for a report, what are they expecting to receive? What makes a report different from a set of records exported from search results?
Reports present data with a message. More than raw data and more than just a subset of records, reports are meant to tell a story. We can begin to understand their purpose by comparing them to search results. They are similar, but differ in several important ways:
- Reports are more specialized in the types of data that can be filtered, and the way in which that data is rendered.
- Reports are intended for more visual uses, whereas a search result yields a simple list of data, which can be exported or acted upon in other ways. A report may present results with a header, footer, and...
