Crafting your first Universal Report

This guide will navigate your through the process of making your first Universal Report.

Create a report draft

The Universal Report is central to the Report Builder. There are three ways to initiate it:

You may reach it from your Reports Dashboard as shown below:

Open

Accessing Universal Report

Alternatively, you may use “Create new report“ button as shown below:

Open

Accessing Universal Report with “Create new report“ button

Finally, to create new Universal report you may get use of “Get started with Universal Report“ button:

The last method initiates a demo-mode with some pre-configured data to experiment with:

With report draft created, you may start configuring your report parameters.

Configure input parameters

Universal Report interface

To configure input parameters, let’s first have a look into report window components:

On the report top you see “Universal Report 15/Jun23“ label. Every new Universal report you create will suggest the date you created it to be included into report name. You are free to change it anytime.

On the right from the report name, you see two buttons: “Add to my reports“ button which actually serves as “save” button. the you press it, the report will be saved and appear in your reports Dashboard.

The far right Export button allows you to export your report to XLS, CSV or PDF.

The next group of controls are designed to let you choose the report visualisation options (Table, Number, Pie Chart, Doughnut Chart, Bar Chart), Data aggregation settings (measures applied to the report data), and define some styling options: color scheme, time tracking units representation. We will review the details of this component later in this guide.

Finally, Report canvas is the area where report will be presented. We will see how different visuals look a like on the canvas later in this guide.

Naming a report

Let’s re-name our report. Simply click report name area, and see how a cursor will appear to edit the name:

Add some creative name to your first Universal Report:

Change the name of a report, and left-click anywhere outside of edit area to save new name.

Filtering data

To visualise the data, you first need to select what the data would be.

Universal report offers two options to get the data:

1. Get the Issues from Jira

2. Get the issues from Jira AND worklogs from Timesheet Builder Application

Exporting worklogs will enable you additional powerful capabilities in regards to reporting against timesheets if you are using Actonic Timesheet Builder application.

When you have defined, if you want to work with issues, or with issues and worklogs, please click “select filters“ to filter out the data:

Depending on the complexity of filtering you need to apply, you either may use JQL-mode, or simple mode. Below is an example of JQL mode usage:

Similarly, you may filter the data in simple mode:

Press “Apply filtering“ button to fetch the data and proceed ti the visualisation.

You will see the default data processing applied:

Let’s process the data by choosing the best visuals and styling.

Processing the data

Processing the data is very easy with Universal Report: You simply choose the visualisation you need to present the data, select data aggregation rules and styling options.

Table View

By default, report builder presents data in a table view. You may choose the hierarchy of rows by clicking on rows area as shown below:

Let’s use Project → Epic → Issue template first. You will immediately notice report layout changed with new data appearing on it:

We may add many fields into the rows list to satisfy the reporting needs. Below we added “Original estimate“ field:

It doesn't make a lot send to creak original estimates as table rows, though. So let’s clean it up and see what we have now in the report:

One of the typical reasons we need reporting for is to see what our team is doing. Let’s change columns value to “Assignee“ as shown below:

We can see report immediately re-built:

Now we can track how many issues every of our team members is carrying.

If we’d like we may change the data aggregation rules (i.e. change the measure we apply to the data). Let’s say, we want to see how many estimated hours we have per task. Simply click “Count“ label which is counting the number of issues at the moment:

Amending the measure method to “SUM“ we will allow the report to calculate the SUM of any time tracking or number fields (including custom fields) as follows:

You may also change the rows and columns together with changing data aggregation methods. For instance, let’s change columns field to “Issue type“. Report will immediately show us following:

Finally, let’s set the styling options. There are two options available for Table View:

• Sum subtasks, which includes subtasks into their parent issues
  and

• Time tracking unit, which allows you to show time units in the best suitable way

Let’s change time tracking unit for “Days“:

You will notice report changed the units it track time to “days“ immediately:

That’s it! Your table view report is finished.

Let’s check now what are the other visualisation views available in Universal report.

Number view

Number represents the data of the report in a form of single numeric value. This view is especially valuable for card-styled dashboards. To set a number view select it from the “display the results as“ selector:

You may also change the measures applied to the data. For instance, below we track the amount of hours logged:

Don’t worry for the number taking the entire report canvas - it will fit the dashboard gadget just perfectly. Please see the dashboards guide for additional details.

Pie Chart and Doughnut Chart

Depending on a situation, it may worth to present the data in a form of a Pie, or Doughnut charts.

It’s so simple to achieve with Universal report:

The best about charts is that you may apply different visual styling for them:

Below is an example of charts in different color schemes:

The final type of visualisation available in Universal reports is Bar chart. Let’s check it out.

Bar Chart view

Bar chart view allows you to present the data in a form of simple bars. It defines the fields which will be used for data grouping, and allows you to apply the same measures you could apply for the rest of the charts and data table. Bar chart also customisable in terms of color scheme and view options.

Example of the bar chart is given below:

When you are happy with your report visualisation, you may save the report, export it, share it with other and edit it.

Save the report

To save any report, you need to add it into your reports dashboard. To do so, simply click “Add to my reports button” as follows:

When the report is added to your dashboard, you will see it available for view:

You probably noticed two new buttons appeared:

Those are “Permissions management“ and “Edit“ buttons. First one will allow you to share the report with others in a controlled manner, and the second one will allow you edit report settings.

Sharing universal report

This guides limits sharing exercise to a simple demonstration. Please follow the detailed guide on Permission model for a detailed view on reports permission management.

To share a report, click “Permissions management” button:

You will see the report permissions pop-up as follows:

By changing “Owner” of the report you may pass the report totally to anther person (report will disappear from “My reports“ dashboard), and that person will become a new editor of the report.

To keep the control over the reports, and add required people or groups view and/or edit permissions, select necessary fields in the “Permissions“ panel:

When you done, simply click “Save button“. Your report is now shared!

Editing Universal Report

To edit Universal report simply click “Edit“ button as follows:

You will see report in edit mode again:

To save the edited report, click “Save button“.

Exporting Universal Report

You can export Universal report data using export button:

The data export will look as follows:

Please notice, that for Universal report, only data export is possible. Charts export is only allowed for scripted reports. Please follow the guide for Export options later in the documentation for details.