design ideas needed for report display

20 column spreadsheet in a webpage

[KansasCoder]

Greetz,

This looks like a good place to ask this question. I hope I'm right. I have been asked to put a report on our intranet that is posing something of a design challenge and I hope some of you more experienced at design could offer some suggestions for me. Here is a brief description of the data.

The data I need to bring online is currently being stored and distributed in an Excel spreadsheet, one worksheet for each month of the year. The spreadsheet contains data related to training classes that are in the planning stages. Each line in the worksheet contains the classname, date, time, teacher and about 10 columns of cost related datapoints, including summary info.

All tolled there are 16 columns and about 30 to 40 rows in each worksheet. There is also a summary line at the bottom of each worksheet tallying up the total costs for all classes in the month.

I don't want to just remake an excel spreadsheet on the website. Maybe that is what you will end up suggesting and that is fine. It seems that there is probably a better way to generate this data so that it can be informative for the user, attractively displayed and still be exported in an excel spreadsheet for distribution (only 1 person will have access to the webpage).

I'm open to any suggestions on layout or technology. I am using asp.net 2.0. most everything on the site now uses the gridview and datagrid objects but I'm thinking this might not be the tool for this.

Thank you very much for your time!

[ergophobe]

Tough one without seeing the data, but it sounds to me like a 16-column data set is a lot to put in a table on the web.

I've done something where I have a table view and a record view on data that has some long fields and some short fields. I'm also one of the heaviest end-users, so I have a feel for it on both ends.

Table view definitely presents some issues for consultation. Sortable columns are good. Users can also filter on pretty much any column so they only get records that have specific data (wild cards and ranges available).

If I were doing it again from scratch, I might let users generate custom reports where only certain columns would show (a checkbox system).

If the table view is too difficult (the most important field is seriously truncated), the user can go to record view where every field is given in full and every field is correctly labelled. I put the short fields in a sidebar and the long fields as the main display. This is the view that users work in for editing.

Not sure how it applies, because the longest field in this data set can be several pages long, so a record view is essential.

I don't know if that's any help at all or not, but it's the closest to your situation I've had.

[KansasCoder]

The fields are all formatted dollar amounts with the exception of the first three which are class name, class location and class date. The dollar amounts are all under 1000.00 so they aren't very long.. just long enough to look kooky.

It's a little odd because I'm not really giving them a report they can do anything with except look at..no slice and dice and very little configuration settings, no summary rows.

The specs are completely lacking so I'm guessing that a spreadsheet might satisfy afterall. I'll just dump it to Excel and not even show them rows.

Thanks for your sharing your experience with me!

[ergophobe]

Ah, okay. Well, in any case, with 16 columns of similar data (currency), it needs odd/even shading and perhaps repeating headers every ten or so lines. Other than that, I can't think of what to offer.

Good luck. I guess no spec means you do it as you like and....