Great overall analytics platform for nimble and scaling organizations
We have really enjoyed using Zoho Analytics at our organization. What we really love about it is how easy it is to connect data sources of …
Starting at $50 per month
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What is Zoho Analytics?
Zoho Analytics (formerly Zoho Reports) is a self-service BI and analytics platform that allows users to analyze their business data and create reports and dashboards. It is designed to help users create and share reports quickly, without IT assistance.
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Popular Features
- Customizable dashboards (111)8.585%
- Report sharing and collaboration (114)8.585%
- Drill-down analysis (109)8.080%
- Formatting capabilities (113)7.575%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Basic
$30
Cloud
0.5M rows, 2 users
Professional
$30
On Premise
per user per month billed annually
Standard
$60
Cloud
1M rows, 5 users
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.zoho.com/reports/zohoreport…
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $50 per month
Features
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- Downloadables
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What is Zoho Analytics?
Zoho Analytics is a self-service BI and analytics platform that enables users to analyze their business data and create insightful reports and dashboards to drive informed decision-making. The recent launch of Zoho Analytics 5.0 adds a data preparation tool.
It helps users create and share reports with no IT help, and is presented as a fit for enterprises because it exceeds all their data cleaning and analytics requirements on a single platform.
Zoho Analytics and DataPrep can be purchased as individual apps to supplement other systems, or together as a complete, natively integrated platform. Individually, Analytics provides a broad range of analytics and reporting capabilities, while DataPrep provides all the tools necessary to streamline the data preparation process in a large organization.
About Zoho's comprehensive Analytics platform:
Zoho DataPrep: An augmented self-service data preparation and pipeline service . Connects, models, cleanses, transforms, and enriches data for analytics.
Upload any data: Securely upload spreadsheets and other tabular data (like CSV, TSV, XLS and HTML files), or add data directly using the spreadsheet-like interface.
Push data from any application: Push data from hosted or in-house (behind firewall) business applications and databases.
Analyze data visually: Visually analyze and build insightful reports and dashboards with a drag-and-drop interface.
Use a range of reporting components: Use a variety of charts, pivot tables and tabular view components to build reports and dashboards.
Analyze data collaboratively: Develop reports together with colleagues. Share with each other for better decision-making.
Embed reports anywhere: Embed reports and dashboards across websites, blogs and applications for wider consumption.
Query with SQL: Create powerful and flexible reports with SQL queries written in any database dialect/syntax.
Experience a highly secure platform: Zoho Analytics is governed by strong Zoho Security Practices, including support for a secure encrypted connection
Enhanced augmented analytics: Zia insights, conversational analytics, forecasting models, and what-if analysis.
Data stories: Create presentations through slideshows and portals
Zoho Analytics Features
BI Platform Features
- Supported: Administration via Web Interface
- Supported: Live Connection to External Data
- Supported: Snapshot of External Data
- Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
- Supported: ETL Capability
- Supported: ETL Scheduler
Supported Data Sources Features
- Supported: MS Excel Workbooks
- Supported: Text Files (CSV, etc)
- Supported: Oracle
- Supported: MS SQL Server
- Supported: IBM DB2
- Supported: Postgres
- Supported: MySQL
- Supported: Cloudera Hadoop
- Supported: Hortonworks Hadoop
- Supported: IBM Netezza
- Supported: HP Vertica
- Supported: Salesforce
- Supported: Google Analytics
BI Standard Reporting Features
- Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
- Supported: Customizable dashboards
Ad-hoc Reporting Features
- Supported: Drill-down analysis
- Supported: Formatting capabilities
- Supported: Predictive modeling
- Supported: Report sharing and collaboration
Report Output and Scheduling Features
- Supported: Publish to Web
- Supported: Publish to PDF
- Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling
Data Discovery and Visualization Features
- Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- Supported: Predictive Analytics
- Supported: Support for Machine Learning models
Access Control and Security Features
- Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
- Supported: Role-Based Security Model
- Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- Supported: Report-Level Access Control
- Supported: Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
- Supported: Single Sign-On (SSO)
Mobile Capabilities Features
- Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
- Supported: Mobile Application
- Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding Features
- Supported: REST API
- Supported: iFrames
Zoho Analytics Screenshots
Zoho Analytics Videos
Zoho Analytics Overview
Case study: Aedgency
Overview of Zoho Analytics
Advanced Analytics for Salesforce CRM, powered by Zoho Analytics
Case study: Luxer One
Case study: Aedgency
Zoho Analytics customer testimonials
Zoho Analytics Integrations
- Zoho Creator
- Zoho CRM
- Google Analytics
- Google Analytics 360
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
- Dropbox Business
- Box
- Xero
- QuickBooks Online
- Zoho Projects
- Zoho Books
- Zoho Recruit
- Zoho Campaigns
- Zoho Survey
- SurveyMonkey
- Mailchimp
- HubSpot CRM
- Teamwork.com
- Zendesk Suite
- Stripe Payments
- Zoho Desk
- Teamwork Desk module
- Microsoft Advertising
- Zoho People
- ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
- Microsoft Dynamics 365
- Google Ads
- Alchemer
- formerly SurveyGizmo
- Microsoft OneDrive
- Salesforce CRM
- Zoho Docs
- Zoho BugTracker
- ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus
Zoho Analytics Competitors
Zoho Analytics Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android |
| Supported Countries | Worldwide |
| Supported Languages | English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, Japanese, Russian |
Zoho Analytics Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
Zoho Analytics (formerly Zoho Reports) is a self-service BI and analytics platform that allows users to analyze their business data and create reports and dashboards. It is designed to help users create and share reports quickly, without IT assistance.
Zoho Analytics starts at $50.
Reviewers rate Multi-User Support (named login) highest, with a score of 8.9.
The most common users of Zoho Analytics are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
Zoho Analytics Customer Size Distribution
| Consumers | 10% |
|---|---|
| Small Businesses (1-50 employees) | 40% |
| Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees) | 30% |
| Enterprises (more than 500 employees) | 20% |
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(286)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 45)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
We have really enjoyed using Zoho Analytics at our organization. What we really love about it is how easy it is to connect data sources of any time, and quickly build reports. Data connections are just a few clicks, and report building is truly drag-and-drop.
Being able to share the reports with others in our organization easily, as well as enabling automatic emails of the reports, is fantastic. Overall just a really great tool for us to stay smart on our business.
Being able to share the reports with others in our organization easily, as well as enabling automatic emails of the reports, is fantastic. Overall just a really great tool for us to stay smart on our business.
- Report building
- Connecting data sources
- Sharing reports within our organization
- Formula building could be easier
- Formatting the charts could be a little easier
- Organizing data and reports could be a little easier
February 28, 2024
Simple dashboards quick and easy
In my organization, we have all our important data inside Zoho Analytics, and it is something that we keep growing every day. With all data in one place it is easier to generate reports and dashboards for all our business needs, and also analyze the performance of campaigns for our clients.
- Charts and Reports.
- Pivot Tables.
- Dashboards.
- Better UI for query tables.
- Revision history (to revert alterations).
- Backup system.
February 27, 2024
Does the job pretty well, minimal complaints
Problem - data reporting was not synced across the org with multiple teams using ~100 tools. Zoho Analytics is able to plug into data of different systems and provide a better and a singular view of those different data sets.
- Connecting to different systems
- Dashboarding
- Reporting views - pivots, csv, excel, SQL queries
- Overlapping workspaces - currently only one workspace can be linked to an existing data source.
- Emailing reports - there is a feature but Zoho emails don't land up in inbox.
December 30, 2023
We would be flying blind without Zoho Analytics
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
The scope of my use case with Zoho Analytics is very broad. We are aggregating data from over ten applications to evaluate and monitor various activities with the company.
A primary, core function of Zoho Analytics within our organization is our Guide Dashboards. These dashboards provide specific details as well as summaries of information that our frontline staff use to organize their time and efforts to serve customers. For example, open and urgent tasks they are responsible for are listed out for them each day. The dashboards also show summaries of how often they've met the SLA requirements on customer service requests.
Providing this real time information to our frontline workers has been critical for them to remain focused on the things that matter most. It has also been a critical tool for providing transparency into how well they are performing compared to the standards we have set for them.
A primary, core function of Zoho Analytics within our organization is our Guide Dashboards. These dashboards provide specific details as well as summaries of information that our frontline staff use to organize their time and efforts to serve customers. For example, open and urgent tasks they are responsible for are listed out for them each day. The dashboards also show summaries of how often they've met the SLA requirements on customer service requests.
Providing this real time information to our frontline workers has been critical for them to remain focused on the things that matter most. It has also been a critical tool for providing transparency into how well they are performing compared to the standards we have set for them.
- Integrates with a wide variety of applications
- Provides opportunities for creating custom metrics
- Provides a user friendly environment wherein layers of analysis can be performed
- Provides flexibility and custom options in the way data is summarized and aggregated
- We've had trouble in the past with getting user permissions to work the way we expect them to
- The restriction where you can only add 3 layers of SQL statements has been burdensome at times
- We would love to see a synchronization frequency of every 1 hour. The 3 hour frequency works out ok though.
May 08, 2023
Zoho helps me help you.
Our organization uses Zoho Analytics to build reports around data that is being captured in our electronic case management system. We generate reports and or dashboards to help further analyze how our programs are doing as well as how our clients are progressing. This includes demographic reports, clients served, # of touchpoints per client, as well as very specifics tied to each client.
- Pull quantitatives from qualitative information.
- Visualization of the data.
- Allows for a good "read" of where your program is in terms of goals.
- Drilling down within the data.
- Using the data to then see the end user (client).
- Modernization of visuals (dashboards).
February 24, 2023
Easy, powerful analytics if you are a small business
We use Zoho Analytics to grapple with data sets generated by our other software tools: accounting, CRM, sales engagement, and marketing. Often times these tools don't have very good analytic capabilities built in, so we export their data to Zoho Analytics for a more refined analysis. We have multiple users that need to access this data and we also need to distribute the analysis sets to our various client. Some of our data tables have rows > 10,000 records and relations to other tables so Excel is not an option at that point.
- Graphically construct an analysis from multiple data tables
- Granular user access controls to data tables and filters
- Integrations both direct and via API with third party tools
- Excellent integration with other Zoho apps like CRM and Books
- Limited options to distribute reports. Would like to be able to distribute to S3, FTP, Zoho WorkDrive, and other destinations automatically.
- The application is designed for GUI use, and while it does support writing SQL this feels awkward
- Not as many formatting options for report output as I would like
We initially used Zoho CRM and then after the successful adoption of CRM, we also used the Zoho Analytics BI platform for Business Intelligence and Insights on Deals. We primarily use it for Sales and Lead Generation Insights and our use case is of simple to medium complexity. We use analytics to create some simple dashboards from our CRM data or data from other lead generation and prospect hunting channel.
- It gives a single unified view everyday for our sales team to look at to track their progress and the progress of their peers in achieving the targets
- It helps Account Executives to analyse their sales pipeline and find out the score for each deal and any high potential deal that is not getting enough attention
- Some of our consultants have built very powerful stories on how and what impacts sales using storyboards and they are well understood by senior leadership
- Some advanced AI techniques for customer segmentation (like clustering), etc. using standard algorithms like k-means etc. is not available or difficult to use
November 10, 2022
A must-use tool for Zoho One users!
As a Zoho One customer we use many Zoho apps, and use the native reports within each app. However, to gain deeper insights across our Zoho apps, we've integrated many of them within a workspace in Zoho Analytics to blend our Zoho data to analyze all aspects of our business.
- Integration of data from our other Zoho apps.
- Report types and KPI options to create insightful reports.
- Packed with features for all business intelligence reporting.
- The number of pre-built reports that are generated when a Zoho app integration is set-up is nice, but at the same same cumbersome in the fact that it forces you to scroll through many reports or use the search feature.
- The sync with other Zoho apps is not real time.
- The learning curve for me has been a bit steep, but for others this may not be the case. My background is not analytical or data related so I've had to learn with patience.
November 09, 2022
Great for reporting on other Zoho apps, difficult to use for integrating with external data
My organization has used Zoho Analytics to create custom analytics dashboards for digital marketing (importing data from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and time tracking (integrating with Zoho Projects). Zoho Analytics is accessed across my whole organization, but only the operations department sets up/manages dashboards due to the complexity of the platform.
- Tons of customization options.
- Sleek dashboard templates.
- Integrates well with other Zoho products.
- Difficult to use compared to other dashboard platforms.
- API connections to non-Zoho sources are not reliable.
November 09, 2022
Zoho Reporting to the rescue!
Different departments are using Zoho Reports for different tasks. It's been very helpful for us for testing purposes against our own APIs as well as for aggregating data from multiple sources. Our executives use it for heavy data analysis to help create models for both financial and forecasting purposes. Our technology department uses it more for testing.
- Automation - The ability to pull in an API feed using a scheduled task makes it as easy as "set it and forget it".
- Scalability and performance - We have never run into an issue with too much data, it always performs well.
- Ease of use - The easy to use interface makes it usable for all levels of technological sense.
- Wizards - It might be helpful to have some cookie cutter type wizards to help new (and less experienced) users get started quickly.
- Tutorials and Help - One thing that I find is that some of my team who are not as tech savvy end up coming to us to ask questions as they can't seem to find answers to their questions easily.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Zoho Analytics is really helpful in automating custom reports for my team and help me keep track of inventory, collection, billing and sales at my company on the regular basis. We have automated multiple custom reports and receive them over email everyday. Custom query builder is really intuitive and new reports can easily be created, scheduled and modified by using the conversational interface available. Mobile version of the app help me manage my reporting needs on the go. Overall, great experience. Must recommended for SME's who wants to run data driven operation within their company.
- Custom report building
- Conversation interface for building query
- Easy scheduling of multiple reports over email
- Easy edit of the standard reports available on books and inventory.
- Custom report suggestion by industry business function - like e-commerce, BFSI specific reports
June 13, 2022
Zoho Analytics for Service Desk Plus Cloud
Zoho Analytics has allowed my team to tap into the data of our Service Desk Plus Cloud environment to build our metrics dashboards, in order to review resource utilization. Unfortunately, the box KPIs Service Desk Plus Cloud offers were limiting our scope of this analysis. It was a seamless process to test out and enable Zoho Analytics in our environment. I look forward to new features and the incorporation of Zoho Survey into the built-in data sources.
- easy report scheduling
- normalizing data
- visual representations
- integration into Zoho Survey
- additional Service Desk Plus Cloud attributes
- calculated fields
April 27, 2022
The New Home Of Prescriptive And Predictive Analytics!
Our business is a marketing, sales, operations, and installation business. We have 11 departments and all need to share data to create a single source of truth. We had data in Zoho CRM for our marketing and sales teams, and we also had data in Zoho Projects for our Operations and Installations team. By utilizing Zoho Analytics we were able to merge the data together into a single platform by using data syncing. With all the information contained within Analytics, we are able to report and visualize the front and back halves of the business model. Doing so allows us to gain deep insights into all the milestones of a customer's journey. We have been able to make smarter business decisions as a result of the information Zoho Analytics has provided which has to lead to our company making the INC 5000 list 2 years in a row.
- Allowing various types of data visualizations
- Creating reports and dashboards that can be easily shared and accessible online
- Deliver scheduled reports via email to various email groups
- Sync with 3rd party software, such as Google Drive, to pull in data tables
- With so many folders in Reports, it would be nice to have a collapse all folders option
- A trouble tickets tracker would be helpful to keep up with various case numbers in a central place
- The support can be difficult to get a hold of at times for real time assistance
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are
using Zoho analytics to manage all of our data and to make the reports for each
client and its basic implementation in our company is to determine sales
strategies and coordination among our departments.I alam also utilizing it to
make sales strategies and prospection of strategies. It has helped us in
decision-making for our business by processing the analysis of data to find out
if we have missed any opportunity.
- A helping tool to organize the data.
- CRM synchronization is pretty good.
- Reporting has become quite easier.
- A lot of customization options.
- Automation of reports makes it a great helping hand.
- The setup of the tool is a bit difficult.
- Setting the tool for initial use is much difficult.
- Formula configuration looks messy at times.
January 27, 2022
AI based reporting and Dashboard made easier and intuitive for all Business use-case
Traditional IT Operation tools capture alerts from all the Infrastructure and then build Reports and Dashboards. This is one of the critical components in an organization NOC. Likewise, several other tools capture different metrics, which leads to several different reports, quite difficult to manage. Henceforth, we utilize advanced and simple to use "Zoho Analytics" to mitigate these shortcomings, centralize our reporting and dashboards from a unified platform.
- Faster search result within Dashboard and/or reports , thanks to the AI
- Easy to build Business charts, options to select different metrics, meaningful end-result
- Capability to share our analysis of data with remote employees, in just few clicks
- Our organization as well varied partners we worked with, they like the simplicity to navigate and build reports, dashboards at a shorter pace. This excludes operation cost and faster analysis of availability, the performance of KPIs. So far, we are yet to see any features that might feel challenging. Overall product support is very prompt and updates as well roadmap are notified to customers, very transparent.
October 05, 2021
Zoho is the best reporting tool around
Zoho Analytics is currently being used in my organization's sales and event planning departments. My organization uses the software to assist in measuring business analytics on each of our client's respective events. We are able to use this software for forecasting processes and to create cost-effective solutions.
- User-friendly interface.
- Ease of use with setting up data feeds.
- Wide variety of ways to view data and reports.
- Initial setup is lengthy.
- Editing data on reports is a bit difficult and the addition of more tools could alleviate this.
- Sharing reports tends to be difficult.
September 28, 2021
An excellent analytics tool
Our team uses Zoho Analytics to manage our data and create reports for our clients, as well as determine our sales strategy and prospecting strategy. It helps us use data to make decisions about our sales and businesses processes by analyzing the data within our sales processes and seeing where we are missing opportunity.
- Helps to keep data organized.
- Syncs sales data with our CRM.
- Makes reporting easier.
- Easy to use
- Interface is intuitive
- Setup can be a little difficult.
- Some settings are difficult to tweak.
- Customization.
May 20, 2021
Great product but support could be better
Zoho Analytics is used by our sales and client relations team to have a running dashboard of all of our sales numbers. [We also use it for] our client outreach data and figures that we would share with clients and also prospects who we are trying to sell. It helps us save time and prevent duplicate work by having one central place for data visualization.
- I love the amount of ways that there is to view data and create reports.
- Integrations are super easy to configure and do not take a ton of work.
- Initially learning the product is pretty easy, at least to get in and access current reports.
- Initial set up definitely takes some time to be able to configure.
- The AI assistant I do not think is ready for prime time yet and could be improved before adding this feature.
- Editing charts and graphs can be difficult and tough to manage.
May 15, 2021
Powerful tool for analytics
Zoho Analytics is an important data tracking tool that our team uses from a sales perspective to build out reports on sales data as well as marketing data for our clients that include social media numbers, website analytics, web impressions, etc. Our reporting methods used to take an excessive amount of time, but this tool has streamlined the process greatly.
- Cross tabulation
- Emailing
- Integrations
- Reporting
- Dashboards
- User interface could use some updating.
- Prices could be cheaper.
May 14, 2021
Excellent tool!
We have been using Zoho Analytics [(formerly Zoho Reports)] all across the organization. It really helped our entire organization stay organized and synchronized. We use Zoho Analytics mainly to quickly report the data across the online systems and then make decisions accordingly. The analysis system creates information completely automatically which really saves us hours of hard work.
- Easy to set up data feeds and build a first set of reports.
- Integration with google sheets works perfectly
- Access to create custom reports which is very easy to make.
- Zoho should provide some training to new customers.
- it's not very user-friendly to those who don't already have some beginner knowledge.
- Quite often runs slow.
Zoho Analytics is an important tool for our team that we use to analyze our sales data from our CRM. All of our business uses this to be able to see where we can improve our sales process and make it better. It overall is to help us aggregate our data and report on it.
- The interface is easy to use and laid out well.
- Reporting provides helpful information from the default.
- Integrations are great.
- Could be improved by providing better templates from the start.
- Could be easier to customize.
- And SQL.
Zoho Analytics is a great software for tracking all of your data and collecting it in one place. We mostly use this for sales data and from information we can pull straight from the CRM. It is mostly used by our sales and operations team and helps us make better sales decisions and create more efficiency in terms of our sales pipeline.
- I like that the reports are easy to show.
- Integrating data is super easy if you use other Zoho products.
- The price is affordable for any sized team.
- Automate the sending of reports to clients or upload to drive, etc. would be a cool feature.
- I wish the integration with Zoho Flow was better and could be used for reporting.
- Setting up the dashboard can take some time initially.
April 30, 2021
Powerful analytics with great features
Zoho Analytics is mostly used by our sales team in order to tell how our team is doing in sales and in order to change our sales strategy or focus on certain areas of the funnel in order to perform better. It helps us build sales reports and make data driven decisions.
- dashboards
- customization
- user interface
- cost
- some settings hard to find
- bugs
December 17, 2020
Convinced review of a happy user
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We've been using Zoho Analytics for about 1 year now. We mainly do quality controls of services and use Zoho to give our customers access to statistics and issue alerts when anomalies are reported. Before moving to it, we were using an in-house developed solution which caused us a lot of maintenance problems.
- Dashboard and reports are fully customizable
- Daily data exchange with a MYSQL base works perfectly
- Interface is very pleasant to use and can be mastered without specific skills
- Support services are reactive and efficient. You can also find lots of tips and solutions on Zoho website
Zoho Analytics gives us a friction-less way to provide dynamic, expressive data on our University's public website.
Problem to solve: Multiple University departments are charged with supplying University facts and statistics to the website. Previously, our only method of fulfilling our responsibility to publish this data was to give PDFs to Marketing, which is responsible for the website. The presentations were not exciting for prospective students or other site users! While Drupal (the site platform) is very capable, we don't have direct access to work with it. Marketing has limited technical ability in-house and consultants are expensive, so we can't give them raw data and expect them to provide visualizations for us. We also have very limited budget for tools.
Zoho resolution of problem: I now massage the data on-premises, on behalf of the responsible departments, and upload it to Zoho. I create visualizations there, arranged in dashboards, and with a substantial amount of control over filtering and presentation. Department users can easily provide feedback to my initial mockups, and changes are easy to make on their behalf, so this becomes a creative, collaborative process. We only have to give Marketing the code to embed our dashboards in their pre-built pages. Not only does this approach allow site users to explore and understand the data much more effectively than the PDFs full of tables did, but also I can refresh the data for a new academic year "under" the visualizations, without Marketing having to change anything.
Problem to solve: Multiple University departments are charged with supplying University facts and statistics to the website. Previously, our only method of fulfilling our responsibility to publish this data was to give PDFs to Marketing, which is responsible for the website. The presentations were not exciting for prospective students or other site users! While Drupal (the site platform) is very capable, we don't have direct access to work with it. Marketing has limited technical ability in-house and consultants are expensive, so we can't give them raw data and expect them to provide visualizations for us. We also have very limited budget for tools.
Zoho resolution of problem: I now massage the data on-premises, on behalf of the responsible departments, and upload it to Zoho. I create visualizations there, arranged in dashboards, and with a substantial amount of control over filtering and presentation. Department users can easily provide feedback to my initial mockups, and changes are easy to make on their behalf, so this becomes a creative, collaborative process. We only have to give Marketing the code to embed our dashboards in their pre-built pages. Not only does this approach allow site users to explore and understand the data much more effectively than the PDFs full of tables did, but also I can refresh the data for a new academic year "under" the visualizations, without Marketing having to change anything.
- Very good bang for the buck, especially if you pre-handle your data before uploading so you're not reliant on the Zoho SQL syntax of raw tables and have fewer, wider rows.
- Reasonable assortment of chart types.
- Usable design surface, especially for a fully web based system.
- Reasonably intuitive organization of content types.
- Nice handling of aggregation functions.
- Limitations in SQL syntax are difficult to guess at; it's a matter of trial and error to find out what won't work as expected. The docs are a little mystifying on this point ("Please do note that this is just a suggested list of functions and is not limited to it. Although, the suggested list is guaranteed to work.") Similarly, you can embed HTML in a dashboard component, including script functions, but it's not clear what will work and what will not. It's just a question of trying stuff out.
- Sometimes it's difficult to know when a change has been saved automatically and when it needs an explicit action. In a similar way, when you're designing a chart, it's sometimes difficult to tell whether you were in View mode or Edit mode after you click Settings (there is no visual clue at that point) and sometimes it seems as though what you do in Settings will have different results depending on what mode you were in. I could be wrong about what's really happening, and whether it's related to mode, but have definitely experienced different results with the same action. This especially applies to formatting such as axis fonts.
- When I'm in the Explorer and click to open a designer, I would love it if the workspaces tab could be clicked to go to the Explorer (it's just a dropdown of available workspace names). I know I can use the sidebar to do this, but it's counter-intuitive that I can't click on that top tab the same way I can click between other top tabs to bring multiple designer surfaces forward while I work. A small thing but it gets me every time.
- I don't find the generated chart and dashboard examples helpful.