e-SoftEasy
blog brought to you by Joaquin M. Santamarina

Welcome to my fifth Newsletter.

During the past weeks I have been working in the final testings & tuning of release 2.6 of e-SoftEasy Business Analytics,  now it is ready.

The main objective of this newsletter is to explain the functionalities available in this release.

The possbility of creating overlaid charts plus the addition of horizontal bar chart types are the two more relevant new functionalities you will find in this release. As you might already know overlaid charts are those that allow showing two charts in the same drawing, this is sometimes quite useful. This functionlity, as most in e-SoftEasy Business Analytics, is quite easy to activate just by clicking a checkbox and picking from a checkbox the report that you wish to overlay.

See below an example of those charts:

 
See also using a horizontal barchart:

 
From a user stand point the difficulty of changing a bar chart from vertical to horizontal is just changing the report type in a picklist, just that.

As a built-in functionality in the tool of course any of these charts can be exported to PDF just by clicking a button, also they can be included in a Dashboard that also can be exported to PDF by clicking a button. As you can see with e-SoftEasy everything is quite easy.

See link to PDF overlaid chart:
Chart in a PDF File

See link to PDF Dashboard of overlaid charts:
Dashboard in a PDF File

Besides those new functionalities, e-SoftEasy Business Analytics Release 2.6 includes among others the following functionalities coming from previous releases:

• eMail Reports automatically to your customers
• Automatic Export to PDF or Excel
• Quick and easy creation of Data reports and Charts
• Charts and Dashboards generation, export to PDF just by clicking a button
• Connect to multiple databases: Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MS Access, etc
• Connect also to Excel files
• Same Dashboard can contain charts of data included in different databases, this way you can compare data from different databases
• Built-in user authentication functionality, this way reports can be shared securely within different areas of your company
• Able to run in the main platforms: Windows, Linux, Unix, etc

Finally and as mentioned in previous newsletters, feel free to post any message with doubts or comments in this blog and I will answer to all of them in timely manner. Before submitting a message remember to register to my blog by clicking the ”JOIN MY COMMUNITY!” button.

Regards,

Joaquin

Welcome to my fourth Newsletter.

During the past weeks I have been working on release 2.6 of e-SoftEasy Business Analytics,  one of the new functionalities I will provide in release 2.6 will be the possibility of creating Overlaid Charts.

Overlaid charts are those that show different charts overlapped, I will be sharing one example as part of this newsletter.

Let’s go back to one of the new functionalities to provide in release 2.5. In the chart below you will see a bar chart with an overlaid line chart. The complexity of creating this report will not be high as you will just need to create two standard charts, one bar chart report and one line chart report. Finally to link them there will be a new screen created in which you will easily be able to link one to the other.

See the result:

As you can see there are two charts, one bar chart and one line chart, the initial one can be read looking at the Investment Y Axis and the line chart looking at the Sales Sales Y Axis. In the chart above you will easily be able to show that an increase of investment will automatically represent an increate in sales.

Finally I would like to let you know again a few features that are unique in e-SoftEasy Business Analytics:

- Chart and Dashboard generation in the web

- Can read from many sources: MS Access, Oracle, MySQL, MS Excel

- Generates automatically PDF files from any chart or dashboard

- Automatic export of Charts and Dashboards

- eMail of Charts and Dashboards to your customers

- And much more

This is all for now, I hope you have seen this as a useful newsletter, any comment or feedback you might have please feel free to submit it in the blog. Remember to register first by clicking the ”JOIN MY COMMUNITY!” button.

Regards,

Joaquin

Welcome to my third Newsletter.

I have been quite busy over the last weeks with different projects and did not have opportunity to update this space, now I am back.

I would like to welcome all new colleagues that have joined the blog since the last post, quite a few I must say. Thx for joining, the more we are the more value we will add.

Ok, so let’s focus in the exercise of this newsletter. My goal today is to share with you how easy is to create a Spider Web Chart with e-SoftEasy Business Analytics. This is a chart type already existing in version 2.0 of the tool, so you all should be able to run the exercise with the e-SoftEasy version downloaded by free once you have registered to my blog.

See below the chart you will be able to create after doing this exercise:

 

As usual, first thing in all business intelligence exercises we need to have the data we want to use to build the report. This time I have created the data into a MS Access database. See data below:

 

Next step is to configure the report into the Manage Database Query screen, see how to do so:

 

Once the report is configured you will be able to run the report using the option Reports-Run-Reports/Charts. You will also be able to export to a PDF file automatically.

See below link to the chart in a PDF file:
Chart in PDF Format

I hope you have seen this as a useful Newsletter, any comment or feedback you might have please feel free to submit it in the blog. Remember to register first by clicking the ”JOIN MY COMMUNITY!” button.

Regards,

Joaquin

Welcome to my second Newsletter.

One of the questions I usually get are related to the creation of e-SoftEasy reports/charts from an Excel document.

Ok, so let’s focus in this Newsletter on the creation of a chart from an Excel document. This chart will compare the value of three Currencies: US Dollar, United Kingdom Pound and Euro.

See below the chart you will be able to create after you running this exercise:

 

First of all let’s see the data we will use to create the chart, see it in the attached excel doc:

Excel Currency Values

The excel doc has three columns, each one of the columns represent a different field in e-SoftEasy Business Analytics: CURRENCY, DATE, VALUE, VERSUSDOLLAR. For our exercise we will use three of those fields: CURRENCY, DATE, VERSUSDOLLAR.

Next step is to configure the report into the Manage Database Query screen, see how to do so:

Once the report is configured you will be able to run the report using the option Reports-Run-Reports/Charts. You will also be able to export to a PDF file automatically.

See below link to the chart in a PDF file:
Chart in a PDF File

I hope you have seen this as a useful Newsletter, any comment you might have please feel free to submit it in the blog. Remember to register first by clicking the ”JOIN MY COMMUNITY!” button.

Regards,

Joaquin

Welcome to my first Newsletter.

I would start by explaining the mission of this new space that I expect to be also yours.  During the past years I have been receiving many question about my tool e-SoftEasy Business Analytics, I have been answering those questions either by email or thru our collaboration space, in most of the cases those questions or doubts have been quite similar so I beleive a Newsletter will help everyone getting to the same level of knowledge of the tool.

Besides that, thru this space I will be sharing features of new releases plus examples that should be useful for you. In return I would also expect for you to post any question or recommendation you might have regarding the tool or the content of the newsletter, my intention is to keep an open dialogue and therefore answer to your questions as soon as possible.

Finally just informing you that e-SoftEasy Business Analytics 2.5 is about to be launched, it includes the latest features requested by many users. Keep in mind that by registering to this Newsletter you will be alerted via email once a Newsletter is released, besides that I will also be providing you with a link to freely download the latest version of e-SoftEasy Business Analytics.

A few features included in 2.5 version:

• eMail Reports automatically to your customers
• Automatic Export to PDF or Excel
• Charts and Dashboards generation
• Connect to multiple databases: Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, etc
• Connect also to Excel files

I hope you really enjoy this space and the already quite popular tool “e-SoftEasy Business Analytics”. Register to the Newsletter by clicking ”JOIN MY COMMUNITY!” button.

Regards,

Joaquin