Visual Intelligence: Microsoft Tools and Techniques for Visualizing Data

Chapter 8

Reporting Services

Reporting Services has an engine dedicated to the marrying of data to a predeveloped visual design, which makes it a very useful tool for displaying information. Reporting in general has seen a great deal of expansion in its capabilities, and in many instances it now has overlapping use cases with other tools. For example, in the past, other tools such as PerformancePoint would have been considered a much more appropriate choice for producing scorecards, but Reporting Services has expanded its capabilities and is able to generate scorecard-type content depicting very graphical summarized information.

Compared with all the other Microsoft business intelligence tools, Reporting Services offers the designer the most control over visual elements, formatting within the reports, and rendering options such as PDF or Excel output. Although this control is very useful, the trade-off is that every piece of layout and interactivity must be planned and implemented while you’re designing reports. Offsetting this effort are the greater visualization capabilities in Reporting Services, such as charts, gauges, indicators, trendlines, and mapping. This chapter is an introduction to developing visualizations using Reporting Services.

Native versus Integrated Mode

Reporting Services offers two supported modes of installation and operation: Reporting Services Native mode and SharePoint Integrated mode. No one operating mode is best suited to all the various reporting ...