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End-users of Lotus Notes are faced on a daily basis with the limitations of the Notes environment with regard to data presentation, reporting and data analysis. Typically what they do to overcome these limitations is any combination of the following:
- live with the limitations and use Notes' Views for the generation of their analysis
- use the capabilities of Notes for exporting the contents of their view to Lotus 1-2-3 in a very raw format from which they read the data from Microsoft Excel and clean it up
- ask their Notes developer to provide a facility to export particular data from a view to Excel.
All of the above options have their own limitations with the reliance on the Notes developer for generation of reports being limited by their availability and their willingness to keep modifying their programs as the reporting needs evolve. This is very high on maintenance.
The Integra family of products allows end-users of Notes to:
- run reports to Excel, Word, PDF or XML using a report profiles in Integra for Notes which have been prepared for them by their Notes developers or a more advanced end-user. Reports are run from a SmartIcon, button or hotspot within any Notes application using a Notes client, web browser or scheduled. No changes to the design of the Notes database are required. See a recorded demo of an end-user running an Integra report.
- generate their own ad-hoc reports directly to Excel from any Lotus Notes view using Integra Quick Reports' very simple 4 step wizard. See a recorded demo of generating and running Integra Quick Reports.
The focus on using Excel and Word as the vehicles for reporting allows end-users to leverage the capabilities in these products and their knowledge of their use. This allows reports to be more dynamic and alive than the static reports generated by most other tools. Automatically capabilities such as Excel charts, pivot tables, filtering, grouping and sorting as well as Word's mail merge, labels and formatting capabilities became available to the user's analysis of the data. More advanced users familiar with Excel or Word macros are able to take link predefined macros with the report templates and enhance the data or its presentation while it is being handled by the report generator.
Reports generated by Integra for Notes or Integra Quick Reports are able to be automatically e-mailed out to recipients as PDF, Excel or Word documents.
Reports generated using Integra for Notes can be:
- e-mailed out
- saved back into a Notes document
- used to update field values in Notes documents with their totals and/or other important information
- scheduled
- made available in web applications
The ability of a developer to utilise LotusScript within an Integra for Notes profile ensures that the reports created by them for end-users can meet the most challenging reporting needs including computations, access to data and queries in other databases including Oracle, DB2, MS-SQL, data in response documents etc.
Printing from Lotus Notes
We also know that Lotus Notes' printing capabilities are not very exact. If you have a need to generate Notes output onto a preprinted form and wish to get the data exactly into a box, this is almost impossible to do accurately and reliably with Notes as the layout will vary between different printers.
Integra for Notes is used by many organisations to move their data to Word and print from Word transparently to the user. An Integra for Notes report profile can be set to push the data to Word and print without Word ever even appearing on screen. This facility brings the reliability and printing accuracy of Word to Notes data.
The use of Word's built-in and highly functional label printing capabilities can also be leveraged from Integra for Notes.
Importing Data
Often we have data contained in Excel, CSV or text files which we regularly need to import into Lotus Notes. Examples could be monthly sales data, daily production figures, insurance policy claims data etc. The scenarios are unlimited. More info.
Integra for Notes can be set by a developer to allow end-users an easy ability to import data into their Lotus Notes databases including drawing data from multiple sources and databases just at the press of the Integra SmartIcon or a button/hotspot.
Learn more about Integra for Notes and Integra Quick Reports
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