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Guidance Required for using Reporting

Discussion Guidance Required for using Reporting

  • Monday, January 23, 2012 2:42 PM
     
     
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    Hi All,

    I am very new to reporting so please excuse me for any silly mistakes\questions.

    I have started learning Reporting using below links:

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff730837.aspx

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff730838.aspx

    But I am now lost as what to choose finally for reporting in my assignment out of Excel, Report Builder or BIDS. I have read that the tool (of Excel, Report Builder or BIDS) to use depends on complexity of reports required.

    I am explaining scenario below and expecting if someone could help me out in moving to the right path:

    1.       We use to generate output daily from TFS for all the items changed today using queries in TFS and import them to excel till now. But now looking for leveraging TFS reporting for the same.

    2.       This report is having some custom fields (Hours Worked for Today & Percentage of work completed (by diving actual\estimated * 100)) which we use to populate manually to the export before sending the final report.

    3.       Finally I want to see report in tabular format and not in any form of charts.

    Based on above explanation can someone please guide which option to choose from (Excel Reporting, Report Builder and BIDS) for this purpose. Also please provide me some tutorials to proceed with suggested option.

    Your help is appreciated.

    Thanks,
    Rakesh
     

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  • Wednesday, March 07, 2012 8:40 PM
     
     
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    Hi,

    For your purpose maybe excel can do. You can access the olap cube from excel as well.

    I am currently working on a blog series about this.

    http://osnabrugge.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/using-custom-reports-in-tfs-part-2-what-tools-can-i-use-to-present-some-data/

    Currently there are only 2 parts. Part 3 is in the make.

    I personally use ReportBuilder 3.0 a lot. It provides almost the same functionality as BIDS but is easier to use. The big difference is the lack of solutions, multiple files and deployment etc.

    A simple tabular report is very easy to do in ReportBuilder as well.

    Hope this helps!

    René van Osnabrugge
    W: www.delta-n.nl
    B: osnabrugge.wordpress.com
    T: @renevo