The Basics

Reports show information about many Scorecard items, Initiative items, or Dataset records at once. They have formatting, grouping, sorting, filtering, and aggregating. In short, Spider Impact now has a full-featured report designer for all of the data it tracks. For example, you can choose to view all of the downward trending KPIs, all of the initiatives owned by a particular person, or aggregated data about every Canadian employee.

Creating a report

To create a new report, click the “New Report” button in the Reports section.

Each report is for a single type of data. First, we’ll choose Scorecards.

You can choose between several pre-built reports like the Red KPIs report and Missing KPI Values report. These reports get you started with “canned” reports that you can configure. See the Prebuilt Scorecard Reports article for more information.

Instead, we’ll build a report from scratch by choosing the Advanced Report Designer option on the bottom.

The Advanced Report Designer for scorecard items starts by showing the scorecard item name, owners, and three periods of data for all KPIs.

Let’s start a new report, and this time we’ll choose Initiatives.

A new Initiatives report starts with showing the budget and schedule information for all non-archived initiative items.

The third type of report is Datasets.

A dataset report shows data from a single dataset, which we’ll choose next.

Dataset reports are a little different from Scorecard and Initiative reports because every dataset field is unique to each dataset. Because of this, dataset reports start blank.

Finally, users with the right permissions can choose SQL reports.

This allows them to write SQL queries against a database that you have set up in Admin > Import Connections. For more information, see the SQL Reports article.

The View and Edit tabs

Regardless of whether you’re writing reports for Scorecards, Initiatives, or Datasets, the general flow is the same. The Reports Edit tab always shows the first three records so you can get a preview of what your report will look like.

When you switch to the View tab, you’ll see your entire report.

Column Sorting

When you're viewing a report, you can temporarily change the sorting by clicking on the column headers. See the Building Reports article for information about setting the default sorting.