Features Trail

Trail on Zoho DB & Reports feature and service evolution.

Recently we provided an option to customize the colors in a chart from the legend. Now we have also added another useful option to filter the chart based on the values listed in the legend. If you would like to either remove a value listed in the legend from the chart or only retain that value and remove the rest you could easily get this done now. Although it was possible previously, now with this feature it has been made much simpler. 

How to filter a legend value?

1. Select the Chart which has to be filtered
2. Click Edit Design and go to edit mode
3. Click on the legend value that is to be filtered
4. A menu will be pop up
5. If you would like to remove this legend value from the chart, select "Filter this value". If you would like to remove all other values from the chart except this one, select "Filter excluding this value"
6. Click Click Here to Generate Graph link to generate the chart with this new filter applied 

Hide Data Type icons on the Table headers during Embed :

We have now added an option to hide the data type (/column type) icons displayed in the table header, when you embed the same in another web page. You can do this by checking/unchecking the option "Include Data Type Symbol" in the "Publish -> Embed in Website/Blog" menu option of the corresponding Table or Tabular View to be embedded.  

Recently we added a feature to export your report into a Printable PDF file. Now we have enhanced this feature to export multiple reports into a single PDF. This would be very useful when you either require to collate selected  reports into a single file for reference or to take a print of all the selected reports in one go.

How to Export multiple reports into a single PDF?

1. Select the "Export -> Export Multiple Views" menu found in the toolbar of all views in a database 
2. You will see a PDF Export settings dialog
   
3. Provide the necessary settings like file name, page size, margins, footer and header
4. Check the option "Generate TOC" if you want Zoho DB & Reports to automatically generate Table of Contents
5. Select the views to the exported from the list "Select Views to Export". You could also order the sequence using the Up/Down arrows provided
6. Click OK to generate the PDF
7. Save the PDF file generated into your local folder or Open it from within your browser

Data Type icons on the Table header :

Another simple usability enhancement has been rolled in with the addition of Data type (/column type) icons in the header of both Tables and Tabular Views. This would enable users to immediately recognize the type of the column with not much effort.  

Zoho DB & Reports now offers a wide variety of formatting options for each data type. With these options you can now choose how you would like to have your data displayed in the various reports created.

How to format a column?

1. Select the table or tabular view in which the columns are to be formatted
2. Right click on the column that is to be formatted
3. Set the necessary formatting option in the dialog that pops up
4. Click OK to apply the formatting changes

Customize Chart Coloring:

In Zoho DB & Reports the colors used in charts have been system generated so far. With this update you can now change the colors used in a chart to suit your taste. Follow the below given simple steps to customize the color in a chart:

1. Select the Chart whose colors are to be customized
2. Click Edit Design and go to edit mode
3. Click on any of the category colors listed in the legend (seen on the right side of the chart) to change the same.
4. A color chooser will be poped up
5. Choose the color required
6. Click Apply to apply the color Or Click on Use Default if you would like to revert to system generated colors.

Auto-recognizing currency data during Import:

Now Zoho DB & Reports has included the intelligence to auto-identify a data column as currency when you import it into Zoho DB & Reports. Auto-recognition would be applied when you import data into Zoho DB & Reports from any of CSV or .XLS or HTML files. The data could be in any of the accepted currency formats (with currency symbol or abbreviation eg., $, USD etc.,) of any country.

Print your Reports:

How to Take a Print in Zoho DB & Reports?

1. Select the report to be printed from within Zoho DB & Reports
2. Select the "Export -> Export as PDF" menu
3. You will see a PDF Export settings dialog.
   
4. Provide the necessary settings like file name, page size, margins, footer and header
5. Click OK to generate the PDF
6. Save the PDF file generated into your local folder or Open it from within your browser.
7. You could print the PDF generated anytime.

Template to Analyze your Google Adword Performance with Zoho DB and Reports:

• Zoho DB & Reports provides a default template, named "Google Adword Campaign Performance Analysis", for analyzing your Google Adword Campaign Performance.
• This template database provides insightful reports that would enable you to easily analyze your Google Adword Campaign Performance. You could also create your own reports for further analysis.
• A Sample Database of the same name is also available which you could use for your own Adword data for analysis.
• Checkout a detailed documentation on How to use Zoho DB & Reports to analyze your Google Adword Performance? 
  

More intelligence & convenience for designing Chart/Pivot/Summary views:

• So far while designing chart or pivot or summary view, you had to drag and drop fields listed on the left to the right and construct the view.
• Now we have provided checkboxes to just select the fields that are to be used to design the chart. This is apart from the existing drag and drop support.
• Zoho DB & Reports intelligently identifies the appropriate position to place the selected field in the design area.
• Also, as another step of intelligence Zoho DB & Reports even selects the right function to apply on the field which is added to the design area.
  

Export Chart as Image:

• You could now export and save your chart as either a PNG or JPEG image
• While exporting you could set the dimension of the image, as well as specify whether to include the title and description of the chart in the image generated.
  

Filters & Search across all tabular views:

• Quick Filter option was so far supported only in Tables.
• Now you could do Quick filtering across all table based views in Zoho DB & Reports. This includes Tabular Views, SQL Query table and tables shown for displaying View Underlying Data in Charts, Pivots and Summary Views.
  

Color your Zoho DB & Reports interface with Themes:

• Zoho DB & Reports now supports themes. You could apply the theme you like by choosing the "Themes" menu at the right top corner of the screen.
• Currently we have only two packaged themes available. More to come very soon....
• The theme you choose will be set to your preference and applied across logins.
  

•  You can now create a copy of a Zoho DB & Reports database.
• Copy Database feature also provides an option to make a copy with and without existing data. If you copy without data then only the tables and report definitions are copied. If you copy with data then all tables, reports along with existing data in the database would be copied.
  You can copy a database following the steps given below:
  • Goto "Existing Databases" section in the home page
  • Under each database that is listed you will find an link "Copy"
  • Click on the "Copy" link for the database that you wish to copy
  • It will popup a dialog where you could provide the name and description for the new database that is to be created
  • Check/Uncheck the "Copy with Data" option depending on whether you would like to make a copy of the database with tables, reports and existing data OR just the tables and reports definition alone
  With this option you could also copy any of the demonstrative Sample Databases that is provided by Zoho DB & Reports.

Save your Filters:

• You can now save the filters that you do on a Table. With this option you could save frequenly used filters and apply them anytime on the table without the need to re-type the search criteria everytime. 
•  Saved filters would be listed under the "Filters" menu option in the tool bar.  

Enhanced Templates:

• We have enhanced the default templates provided namely, Issue Manager and Project Manager templates, with useful set of default reports.
• While creating a database from templates you could also choose to "Populate with Sample Data" which would enable you to easily understand the features offered by the template database.

Specify Interval between Axis Labels in Charts:

• You can now specify the interval between axis labels in a chart.
• Currently supported only for numeric columns and only in Line and Scatter charts
• No support available for Mult-Y charts.

New Theme and Layout for Charts, Pivot and Summary reports:

•  We have enhanced the theme and layout for Chart, Pivot and Summary reports. Hope you like it.

• You can now import HTML table contents into Zoho DB & Reports.
• Enables importing data in any HTML table into Zoho DB & Reports as you import CSV data.
• The HTML file should contain atleast one Table inside it for importing

• Copy/Paste the HTML code into the Import Wizard
• Load a HTML file from a local folder
• Load a HTML from an accessible Web URL

Right Click Popup Menu in Table and Tabular Views:

• You can now access most of the operations in Table and Tabular View by Right Clicking on the Table header and accessing the options listed in the popup.
  
  

• You can now specify the minimum and maximum range of points in a chart.
• Currently supported only in Line and Scatter charts.
• No support available for Mult-Y charts.

• Now you can filter or search data in the table using the “Filter“ option in the tool bar. We have provided variety of options to filter the data based on the type of the column

Support for data in Multiple Character Set:

• You can import data in different character set and do any type of data manipulation and reporting.

New Chart Types:

• In our first release we only had 5 types of chart supported (basic Pie, Line, Scatter, Bar and Table). Now we support 14 chart types including Web Chart, Stacked Bar, 3D Pie, 3D Bar etc.,

Groups support for easy Collaboration:

• Now you could create a Group for each database and associate a set of users within it. View creation, sharing etc., could now be done easily at the group level rather than at each user level. This would facilitate much easy collaboration in a team environment.

To know more about this update please refer to our blog post