Welcome

Overview

Welcome to the ReportWORQ Version 5 documentation. 

ReportWORQ is designed to provide a comprehensive solution for the business problem many enterprise planning administrators and power users face: what is the most effective way to generate and distribute data to users?

Many customers have solved this problem, historically, by dedicating personnel to the job of report distribution, often using Excel VBA to speed up these efforts.  ReportWORQ, by contrast, was designed to meet modern report distribution needs. It offers a much more comprehensive framework that customers can use to leverage their existing library of Excel reports, enabling them to develop report distribution packages and jobs that can be used to generate reporting content in a variety of formats (Excel, PDF, HTML) targeted in different ways to suit their organizational requirements (Email, Slack, Teams, Google Workspace, SharePoint, etc.).  ReportWORQ runs in a multi-threaded environment and leverages enterprise planning APIs which help support a fast, reliable, and consistent process for generating and distributing reports.

The ReportWORQ process typically begins by adding Microsoft Excel reports for which you want to refresh for a specific data filter, then distribute. Excel files can contain External Links, Excel Formulas, SQL Data Connections, or report specifications to supported planning systems such as IBM, Workday, Oracle, and Anaplan. Each worksheet in the report can be assigned specific options for formatting and layout.  In addition, worksheets can be reordered or even excluded from the output.  It's not uncommon for a user to use a "Control" sheet in a report to drive selections, but then later exclude this worksheet from the output.

Once reports have been added to the system, Parameters can be added to the report worksheets and mapped to cell locations to drive loading data in the report.  The intent is to provide a value for the parameter which will eventually flow to the specified cell or report specification, which will commonly be used to drive data lookups (e.g. VLOOKUP, a DBRW formula, the WHERE filter of a SQL statement).  A parameter can be a single value or a list of values.  When a list of values is supplied, that worksheet in the report will be copied for each value in the list. This is a dynamic approach to copying a worksheet for a list of cost centers, divisions, etc. The list can be provided manually or dynamically from a supported datasource such as a Planning Analytics Subset, a Planning Analytics MDX query, or a Workday Adaptive Attribute. 

A ReportWORQ Job creates dynamic reporting packets by combining reports and parameters, which are generally created for a list of users or entities with specific data filters for each recipient.  The report output is created and configured to distribute through Email, Slack, SharePoint, Google Workspace, or any other supported means.  Additional options such as the output format, removing formulas, or creating automatic page numbers are specified.  ReportWORQ provides rich HTML email formatting options along with variables so that data and insights can be personalized and formatted directly into email messages. 

Getting Started

Now that you have an understanding of ReportWORQ follow these steps to get started:

1. Download and Install ReportWORQ

2. Request a License Key

3. Watch the Quick Start Guide Video

4. Read the User Guide

5. Ask Support for help with your first ReportWORQ Job