Data Storytelling with Zoho Analytics

Data Storytelling with Zoho Analytics

Zoho Analytics is a unique self-service BI tool that comes with unique benefits. It is a reporting and analysis tool that targets at helping business users in a comprehensive way. With the use of individualized dashboards, over 76% of Zoho analytics businesses use the product for almost an equal portion of users.

The organizations that use Zoho Analytics benefit immensely because they have greater control over data visualization and analysis. It is an advanced analytics platform that can be used to visually analyze data, access data, forecast data, and share and collaborate data too.

Data storytelling is one of the most well-defined methods of delivering consumable insights through familiar and consistent business workflows while increasing insight adoption. By using the data storytelling capabilities of Zoho Analytics, users can create stories with immersive presentations and purpose-built analytical portals for sharing insights.

Zia insights come with a storytelling capability that offers automated insights through the textual narration of important insights from reports and dashboards. This is something that reduces the time and effort needed to explore data and glean insights.

Reimagining Data Storytelling

Data storytelling is a lot about delivering consumable insights with familiar and everyday business workflows while also increasing the adoption of insights. With the use of data analytics features that it offers, one can create beautiful presentations and set up purpose-built high-quality analytical portals for sharing more insights.
Zoho Analytics can be used to tell interesting stories. Some ways in which that is possible are:

1. Crafting Presentations With Basic Slideshow: Many times, you may want to add colorful data visualizations for depicting data trends in the presentations. With a display of supporting factual aids, reports, and other dashboards on large TV screens for a live view of important metrics, great value can be added to a presentation.

Zoho Analytics makes creating presentations with a basic slideshow very easy. It is an analytics platform that allows you to publish the views in your workspace as a slideshow. You can either embed or create a permalink for the slideshow just as needed. You can also create slideshows, view them in big-screen mode, and manage slideshows.

2. Crafting Analytics Presentation With Advanced Slideshow: The advanced slideshow is a powerful method of data storytelling with features that allow you to craft impressive presentations blending visualizations that are created in Zoho Analytics.

Along with the visualizations, you can also add narrative elements including text, videos, infographics, and shapes in your presentations for creating an interesting and analytical story.

3. Portal: The portal is for organizing reports and dashboards that you have created into pages and publishing them as a microsite for easy access to the users. The website is a standard and familiar method of consuming any kind of information which is why publishing the analytical content is a feature that Portal allows you to do.

The microsite portal allows you to publish reports and dashboards from all over the Zoho Analytics workspace combining the rich formatted texts and visuals. It is also easy to use a variety of website templates for creating an interactive and rich website portal that enables any type of user to access, interact, and consume important business insights.

4. Zia Insights: With its natural language generation capability, Zia Insights offers actionable insights in the form of digestible narrations. This allows the customer to get important insight immediately. 

Deriving insights from reports and dashboards can get pretty time-consuming. Rather than interpreting the chart manually, the users can make quick decisions and that too strategically by discovering the hidden insights instantly.

As one of the most trusted self-service BI constituents of the Zoho business suite, Zoho Analytics comes with users/vendors or businesses that aim to offer combined and augmented business analytics to their customers. It supplies a wide number of diverse connectors to data sources that the users can easily integrate into a central data model design.

Moreover, Zoho Analytics can also be used by business users for making informed decisions. There are many business connectors for Zoho and non-Zoho apps that can identify and map table relationships actually. It can further create a domain and cross-domain models. It also trains users to create sample reports using individualized dashboards for pacing up implementation for analytics.

  1. AI-Powered Data Preparation: You can easily integrate, model, clean, and enrich data from inside using the data analytics features of Zoho Analytics. The AI-powered advanced and self-service data preparation service helps in advanced Zoho Data Prep. This is an integration that widely helps in improving the ETL capabilities of Zoho Analytics.

  2. Zia Insights: Zoho Analytics comes with smart assistance called Zia which takes augmented analytics up a notch. Zia offers automatic insights and that too in an easy-to-understand narrative for better decision making. It comes with a Chatbox which further allows you to have a more immersive and meaningful conversation with Ask ZIA.

  3. Enhanced Forecasting: You can easily choose the forecast model that suits your requirements in the best ways while using the data to make suitable forecasts. The enhanced forecasting presented by Zoho Analytics helps in making informed decisions.

Conclusion

Zoho Analytics is an evolved platform that facilitates analytical insight presentations in the context of familiar business workflows. The users can add rich text, images, and shapes for weaving data stories for the audience with the help of Zoho analytics. It can also be used to create purpose-built analytics portals and make data-driven decisions at all endpoints in the journey of a customer.

In the future, the data visualization list of Zoho Analytics is also expected to get bigger with the introduction of new visualizations coming in.
 

Cheers!

Abhi

Seasoned Zoho Authorized and Certified Partner


Feel free to contact me if you have any queries

Email: abhishek(@)encaptechno(dot)com

Call: +1-416-405-8185


    Access your files securely from anywhere

        All-in-one knowledge management and training platform for your employees and customers.







                              Zoho Developer Community




                                                    • Desk Community Learning Series


                                                    • Digest


                                                    • Functions


                                                    • Meetups


                                                    • Kbase


                                                    • Resources


                                                    • Glossary


                                                    • Desk Marketplace


                                                    • MVP Corner


                                                    • Word of the Day


                                                    • Ask the Experts



                                                              • Sticky Posts

                                                              • Tip of the Week - Spot Risky Sales with Conditional Formatting

                                                                In Zoho Analytics, small tweaks can lead to big insights. One such feature is Conditional formatting based on other columns, your key to instantly spotting where sales success is overshadowed by product returns. Our tip this week shows you how to apply


                                                              Manage your brands on social media



                                                                    Zoho TeamInbox Resources



                                                                        Zoho CRM Plus Resources

                                                                          Zoho Books Resources


                                                                            Zoho Subscriptions Resources

                                                                              Zoho Projects Resources


                                                                                Zoho Sprints Resources


                                                                                  Qntrl Resources


                                                                                    Zoho Creator Resources



                                                                                        Zoho CRM Resources

                                                                                        • CRM Community Learning Series

                                                                                          CRM Community Learning Series


                                                                                        • Kaizen

                                                                                          Kaizen

                                                                                        • Functions

                                                                                          Functions

                                                                                        • Meetups

                                                                                          Meetups

                                                                                        • Kbase

                                                                                          Kbase

                                                                                        • Resources

                                                                                          Resources

                                                                                        • Digest

                                                                                          Digest

                                                                                        • CRM Marketplace

                                                                                          CRM Marketplace

                                                                                        • MVP Corner

                                                                                          MVP Corner









                                                                                            Design. Discuss. Deliver.

                                                                                            Create visually engaging stories with Zoho Show.

                                                                                            Get Started Now


                                                                                              Zoho Show Resources

                                                                                                Zoho Writer

                                                                                                Get Started. Write Away!

                                                                                                Writer is a powerful online word processor, designed for collaborative work.

                                                                                                  Zoho CRM コンテンツ




                                                                                                    Nederlandse Hulpbronnen


                                                                                                        ご検討中の方




                                                                                                                • Recent Topics

                                                                                                                • Train Zia answer bot on only part of Knowledge Base?

                                                                                                                  We are trialing Zia answer bot and hope to use it on the knowledge base to help our users find the information they are looking for. I have found how to train Zia on the entirety of our knowledge base. But is there a way to train it on only certain categories
                                                                                                                • Smarter holiday planning with yearly-specific Holiday Lists

                                                                                                                  Hello everyone! Managing holidays and business hours is now easier and more efficient. Holiday Lists now support holidays that fall on different dates every year, while business hours now supports more than one holiday list. This helps businesses manage
                                                                                                                • Temporary Outage in Zoho Cliq Affecting US Users – July 23, 2025

                                                                                                                  We experienced a service disruption in Zoho Cliq that impacted core functionality for users in the US region. The issue occurred between Jul 23, 2025, 06:54:00 PM IST and 07:13:13 PM IST, lasting approximately 19 minutes. To restore service stability,
                                                                                                                • Zoho Writer for Proposals

                                                                                                                  Hi, one of the things we've struggled with since moving to Zoho ecosystem is our proposal software Qwilr does not integrate well. It surprises me Zoho doesn't have proposal software but given all the capabilities of Zoho Writer, I'm wonder if anyone is
                                                                                                                • CRM HAS BEEN SOOO SLOW For Days 05/15/25

                                                                                                                  I have fantastic Wifi speed and have zero issues with other websites, apps, or programs. It takes an excruciatingly amount of time to simply load a record, open an email, compose an email, draft a new template, etc. Am I in a subset/region of subscribers
                                                                                                                • Approvals in Zoho Creator

                                                                                                                  Hi, This is Surya, in one of  my creator application I have a form called job posting, and I created an approval process for that form. When a user submits that form the record directly adding to that form's report, even it is in the review for approval.
                                                                                                                • How to Create a Fixed Sliding Time Window (D-45 to D-15) in Zoho Analytics ?

                                                                                                                  Hello, I would like to create a report in Zoho Analytics based on a sliding time window between D-45 and D-15, with a fixed snapshot of that specific period. The data displayed should strictly reflect activity recorded between D-45 and D-15 only, without
                                                                                                                • How exactly does "Reply assistance" work in Zoho Desk? What context is sent to the LLM?

                                                                                                                  Hi, Im trying to better understand the technical behavior of the feature "Reply assistance" in Zoho Desk, and I couldn’t find detailed information in the current documentation. Specifically, I have questions about what data is actually being sent to the
                                                                                                                • How Does Knowledge Base Search and Article Recommendation Work?

                                                                                                                  Hello, I would like to understand how the Knowledge Base search engine works. Specifically, does it search based on: The article title only? The full article content? Both, the article and the content? Keywords? Tags? Also, how does the system determine
                                                                                                                • View Answer Bot conversations?

                                                                                                                  We are trialing Zia and are experimenting with Answer Bot on our knowledge base. So far so good! Management asks me if it is possible to view Answer Bot conversations, the purpose being to look over its shoulder and confirm that it is working as des
                                                                                                                • 🚀 WorkDrive 6.0 (Phase 1): Empowering Teams with Content Intelligence, Automation, Accessibility, and Control

                                                                                                                  Hello, everyone! WorkDrive continues to evolve from a robust file management solution into an intelligent, secure, and connected content collaboration platform for modern businesses. Our goal remains unchanged: to simplify teamwork, strengthen data security,
                                                                                                                • Zoho Campaigns: An Outstanding Email Marketing Tool

                                                                                                                  Introducing Zoho Campaigns! A product designed by Zoho, the Zoho Campaigns is made to create, deliver, and manage integrated email campaigns that can help in boosting the sales of a company and its customer base. Zoho Campaigns is actually an email marketing
                                                                                                                • Zoho Creator Developer Console | Improved Distribution and Lifecycle Management for apps

                                                                                                                  Hello everyone, We're excited to introduce new enhancements now in the Zoho Creator Developer Console. These updates strengthen private app distribution through licensing controls and extend environment support across all installed apps, helping teams
                                                                                                                • Anchor Links in Dashboards

                                                                                                                  Hello,  Our dashboards frequently have multiple sections that would be more easily skipped between using anchor links. Please consider adding an anchor link feature to the text widget? This could be done by adding an anchor link option to the text widget next to the "remove" option (see screenshot). The option would assign an ID to the <div> containing the text widget in the live dashboard. Then, the chosen ID could be linked using a traditional <a href="#link_id"> in the html section of the text
                                                                                                                • Zoho CRM for Everyone's NextGen UI Gets an Upgrade

                                                                                                                  Hello Everyone We've made improvements to Zoho CRM for Everyone's Nextgen UI. These changes are the result of valuable feedback from you where we’ve focused on improving usability, providing wider screen space, and making navigation smoother so everything
                                                                                                                • Sync images with Shopify/Cart

                                                                                                                  Hello, sync images with shopify or other cart, it cuts out the double work of having to upload to shopify/cart and zoho. Thanks
                                                                                                                • Allow selection of select inactive users in User data fields

                                                                                                                  Hello, We sometimes need to select a previous employee that has an inactive account in the User data field. For example, when doing database cleanup and indicating actions are done by a certain employee that weren't filled out when they were part of the
                                                                                                                • Is it Possible to Modify Standard Report Urls

                                                                                                                  Is there a way to permanently modify standard report Urls? Use case: Suppose I have a Products report. Showing list as timeline, calendar, or kanban doesn't make sense. Want to hide that from users by adding #Report:Products?zc_ShowAs=false&zc_Print=false
                                                                                                                • Assessment Answered - Automation (Related List)

                                                                                                                  Hello everyone, We have linked a candidate assessment to our job posting. When someone applies, they are required to answer all the assessment questions. However, some candidates submit their applications without completing the questions. In such cases,
                                                                                                                • External User onboarding for zoho connect is not really intuitive.

                                                                                                                  So the external user is sent an invite, which has a button that directs them to login to zoho to view the invite, but if they don't have a zoho account, they cannot access that invite, which seems kinda silly, as there is not real way on for them to create
                                                                                                                • Having trouble fetching contents of Zoho Connect Feeds using the API, requesting alternative API documentation.

                                                                                                                  I'm trying to retrieve feed/post data from Zoho Connect using the API but facing challenges with the current documentation. What I've tried: OAuth authentication is working correctly (getting 200 OK responses) Tested multiple endpoints: /pulse/nativeapi/v2/feeds,
                                                                                                                • How to upload file to Connect using API?

                                                                                                                  Hi there. I looked at the API documentation and nowhere did it mention how to use the API method to upload a file even though it is mentioned that it is possible to be done so. Please help.
                                                                                                                • Select the task view on the board in the Zoho Connect iPhone app

                                                                                                                  Hello. How do I select the task view on the board in the Zoho Connect iPhone app? The Android app has this functionality.
                                                                                                                • The power of workflows in Zoho Marketing Automation - Video Webinar

                                                                                                                  In this Zoho Marketing Automation video webinar, our experts walk you through: Why you may want to create marketing workflows How to create marketing workflows Use Zoho CRM data and apply workflows to automate your marketing strategy How workflows can
                                                                                                                • Auto tagging

                                                                                                                  Some of the articles I enter into Notebook get there when I enter them in Raindrop.io and IFTTT copies the articles in Notebook. When this happens the notes are tagged but instead of useful one word tags with topic the tag pertains to the specific article
                                                                                                                • Constant refresh required in lots of Zoho tabs

                                                                                                                  "Hey Zoho, if you can sync my notification bell across 15 tabs using a BroadcastChannel, why can't you send a 'Data Refresh' signal the same way? We don't need a browser reload—we just need the data to sync without us clicking F5 like it's 1999." "PS:
                                                                                                                • What's New in Zoho Billing | January 2026

                                                                                                                  Excited about the latest enhancements in Zoho Billing? Our January updates bring an intelligent AI assistant, smarter subscription management, and improved tax compliance, saving you time and reducing manual work. Dive into the details below to see how
                                                                                                                • Cliq iOS can't see shared screen

                                                                                                                  Hello, I had this morning a video call with a colleague. She is using Cliq Desktop MacOS and wanted to share her screen with me. I'm on iPad. I noticed, while she shared her screen, I could only see her video, but not the shared screen... Does Cliq iOS is able to display shared screen, or is it somewhere else to be found ? Regards
                                                                                                                • Inserting images into Articles or Knowledgebase

                                                                                                                  Hi, Are there any plans in improving the Knowledgebase text editor so it would allow inserting images through Windows clipboard via copy-paste? Say for example I took a screenshot using the snipping tool in Windows and I'd like to insert that image to
                                                                                                                • Links not functioning in Zoho mail

                                                                                                                  Links that are included in emails I receive are not activating. Nothing at all happens when I click on them. I have researched FAQs and this forum to no avail. Any suggestions?
                                                                                                                • Zoho Mail iOS app update: Manage folders and tags

                                                                                                                  Hello everyone! In the most recent version of the Zoho Mail iOS app, we have brought in support to manage(create, edit and delete) the folders and tags. Create folders Create Tags Edit/ Delete folder In addition to this, we have also brought in support
                                                                                                                • Zoho Social API for generating draft posts from a third-party app ?

                                                                                                                  Hello everyone, I hope you are all well. I have a question regarding Zoho Social. I am developing an application that generates social media posts, and I would like to be able to incorporate a feature that allows saving these posts as drafts in Zoho Social.
                                                                                                                • [Important announcement] Zoho Writer will mandate DKIM configuration for automation users

                                                                                                                  Hi all, Effective Dec. 31, 2024, configuring DKIM for From addresses will be mandatory to send emails via Zoho Writer. DKIM configuration allows recipient email servers to identify your emails as valid and not spam. Emails sent from domains without DKIM
                                                                                                                • Create an Eye-Catching Announcement Widget for Your Help Center

                                                                                                                  Hello Everyone! In this week’s edition, let’s explore how to keep your customers updated with exciting news in the Help Center. See how ZylkerMobile wowed their customers by bringing updates right to their portal. ZylkerMobile, the renowned brand for
                                                                                                                • UI issue with Organize Tabs

                                                                                                                  When looking at the organize Tabs window (bellow) you can see that some tabs are grayed out. there is also a "Add Module/Web Tab" button. When looking at this screen it's clear that the grayed out tabs can not be removed from the portal user's screen
                                                                                                                • Super Admin Logging in as another User

                                                                                                                  How can a Super Admin login as another user. For example, I have a sales rep that is having issues with their Accounts and I want to view their Zoho Account with out having to do a GTM and sharing screens. Moderation Update (8th Aug 2025): We are working
                                                                                                                • Task list flag Internal/External for all phases

                                                                                                                  Phases are commonly used in projects to note milestones in the progression of a project, while task lists can be used to group different types of tasks together. It makes sense to be able to define a task list as either internal or external however the
                                                                                                                • Zoho CRM Feature Requests - SMS and Emails to Custom Modules & Time Zone Form Field

                                                                                                                  TLDR: Add Date/Time/Timezone form field, and be able to turn off auto timezone feature. Allow for Zoho Voices CRM SMS Extension to be able to be added to custom modules, and cases. Create a feature that tracks emails by tracking the email chain, rather
                                                                                                                • Our Review Of Zoho CRM after 60 Days

                                                                                                                  The purpose of this is to just share with Zoho why I love their product, but ultimately why I could not choose Zoho CRM for our next CRM. About two months ago we begun a CRM exploration process for our financial planning firm, based in Texas. We already
                                                                                                                • Link Purchase Order to Deal

                                                                                                                  Zoho Books directly syncs with contacts, vendors and products in Zoho CRM including field mapping. Is there any way to associate vendor purchase orders with deals, so that we can calculate our profit margin for each deal with connected sales invoices
                                                                                                                • Next Page