Disclaimer: Contains silly memes, shameless plugging, and awesome charts!
An Ode to the Reporting We Must Do
While we love playing with data and base most corporate decisions on it, us managers dread making reports for its analysis. What we hate with an even greater burning passion is having to update it at the end of every month–or whatever frequency you’ve set up for your department. Sadly, making reports is part of the job and they’re highly useful in helping us identify trends. We know we can leverage our findings to understand, improve, and develop performance.
That said, most of us would love to minimize the hard work that goes into hauling data from various sources, including software, departments, team members, etc., organizing it, and only then analyzing it. Additionally, there’s also the possibility of making mistakes. Humans were definitely not made for repetitive and mindless copying-and-pasting jobs! In other words, we spent more time managing our data than interpreting so we can act on the insight it has to offer!
Dynamic reporting and learning how to automate charts in PDFs are the solutions to our data management troubles.
What’s So Dynamic about Dynamic Reports?
Businesses that fail to remain competitive are likely to turn belly-up. Avoiding that is becoming more and more about taking data-driven decisions. And being able to produce accurate reports and associated visualizations quickly is crucial in making that happen. By switching to dynamic reporting, businesses can keep up with the quickly evolving consumer needs and choices due to:
- Error reduction
- Streamlined reporting
- High quality visualizations available almost instantaneously
- Easily communicating insights to stakeholders
- Making timely and data-informed decisions
Hail Image Charts–the Best Choice for Data Charting & Visualization
Image Charts is the platform you should be using to create data visualizations for work–and as you see above, fun.
Charts for Every Occasion
It’s easy to use and compiles a bucketload of chart types that you can conceivably use to display your data, such as:
- Bar Charts
- Line, Scatter, and Sparkline Charts
- Pie and Doughnut Charts
- Polar, Radar, and Bubble Charts
Charting in Choppy Waters
What makes hundred of users instant Image Charts fans are its free-to-use chart generating tool. While the paid version comes with various cool features, including watermark removal, the tool lets you take your chart-making skills for a test drive.
Quick & Dirty Charting
Another great thing you should check out is the Image Charts gallery. It houses examples of all chart types on offer at Image Charts. So, when you’re short on time, but still need to wow your viewers, pick the best-for-you chart type, just plug in your data in place of the sample values, and your chart will be good to go!
All Customizations on Deck!
Whether you want to pick outrageously named hues to spruce up boring data-based charts (see below), settle on the line thickness and style, or the chart size of your dreams, it's all doable via Image Charts.
Chart Your Way to Any Port You Want
Once you've integrated your Image Charts account with Zapier or Make, you can use that integration for pulling data and sharing charts anywhere, including MailChimp, Email, Visualforce, Team, and Slack.
But we promised you dynamic reporting, and that's where we're headed next:
How to Dominate Dynamic Reports through Zapier Automation
Image Charts automation makes dynamic reporting possible and simple by allowing you to integrate with Zapier and Make.
Here's how you can automate pdf creation by using Zapier:
1. Decide on the data source you’ll be using–that will be your Trigger. You can choose any platform from Gmail to Calendly as long as Zapier integrates with it.
My objective was to automate the modification of a chart whenever I added a new row into the spreadsheet above.
2. Now log into your Image Charts account via Zapier and get to charting. In short, pick the best-for-your-data chart type, add the values in, and make the chart.
Keep filling in the required fields. Want to make a Polar chart the way I did? Here’s the how-to. Think your data requires you to automate pie charts instead? Some other chart type? Find one here.
3. Finally, pick the tool to automate charts in PDFs and Zapier will send it there. Then you can access it via a new, shiny URL.
Like with the previous two options, you can also run a test for this one.
Make Your Reporting Tools Work for You
It shouldn’t be the other way around! Automation can help you get more out of reporting tools, speed up the creation and sharing of reports, and spice them up with pretty-looking charts. The last one’s where Image Chart excels–shameless, remember? Manage data more efficiently by learning how to automate reports, so you can understand and analyze it better before communicating your takeaways to the relevant parties.
FAQs
1. How do I automate a PDF document?
You can use platforms like Zapier and Make to connect three very different tools (in this case, your data source, and your chart making and pdf tools) and automate the whole process. Whenever you–or someone else with access to the data source–adds new values to it, your automated workflow will ensure it’s picked up, sent to your chart maker, and create a new pdf with that info!
2. What dynamic reports should I create with pdf automation?
You can craft workflows to create dynamic reports accompanied by gorgeous Image Charts graphs and:
- Automate expense reports to keep track of company accounts, individual allowances, etc.
- Speed up prep for EOY meetings when you automate annual reports
- Automate marketing reports to monitor how well your campaigns are doing
- Automate shopify reports to stay on top of sales and customer interactions
- Track team progress when you automate daily reports log for when your team members check in
3. Is it possible to automate PDF?
Yes, it is! And you can do it through Zapier. That way, your charts always remain up to date with the latest data and are ready to be sent off to stakeholders, used for data analysis, presented at meetings, and more.
