Here at Innova, we create many different applications for many different clients, but almost all of them have one thing in common — they are wrapped around a SQL database. And where there is a database, there must be reports.

Let’s face it, writing a nice user interface for web or desktop apps can be pretty satisfying. There’s nothing more beautiful than pages or forms that just work the way they should. Users love them and kudos are doled out like cheap Mardi Gras trinkets. Creating reports, on the other hand, can be tedious at best and downright oppressive at worst.

Managers like Excel. It’s a proven fact that all management in the US (heck, the world for that matter) would come to a grinding halt if Excel was suddenly stripped from every desktop in the corporate world. It’s a tool with which they are familiar and relatively proficient. And since Excel is ubiquitous, it can be a great way to put information comfortably into management’s hands.

We have found that Excel nicely fills a niche in our arsenal of reporting tools. What we are not talking about is generating static Excel files on the backend and then distributing them to a broad group of users. Instead, we use Excel as a front-end to generate dynamic, live reports. We prompt the user for query parameters and then populate the worksheet with the results of their real-time query.

We’ve had nothing but raves from our clients when we’ve implemented this approach. Realistically, this is great for small to medium sized clients where the user base is relatively contained, but it would work equally well at the departmental level in larger organizations.

In our next installment, we’ll take a look at the nitty-gritty of how we implement this approach.