Sheet More Flexible than Reports (Sheet vs. Reports)
Hi,
I had an issue I wanted to test:
Issue: Needed project description data listed and displayed.
Analysis: Commonly used Sheet to display test data as would an ordinary HTML text-based report. Policies and historical project data are kept within a single workbook.
Synopsis: Questioned whether Reports could display data the same as Sheets, essentially creating a DB compared to workbooks. When tested column data was straightforward; basically in Reports, all the data entered in Reports are tokens (token data) used to display data. This token data has already been filtered, meaning, it's not raw data or source data. For example, in Sheet I could write a text paragraph and stretch the field dimensions, whereas, in Reports I could only enter inline text data; the field dimensions couldn't be altered.
Conclusion: Reports is an exceptional tool for creating BI dashboards, though it lacks flexibility. Sometimes in Reports an entire DB must be deleted because fields contained data haltering alterations to the dashboard; field data binds the dashboard and vice versa. I haven't come across a worksheet or charting in Sheet that was bound to it's data; it essentially defeats the purpose of "live data." There were issues in Reports, where after creating a dashboard, I couldn't enter new columns into the DB. Reports has to be used as if, neither the dashboard nor DB constructed will not structurally change.