Any business professional knows there are best practices guides for all aspects of the business world and that includes the business reporting field. There are guides that give you tips on essential topics like how to design a business report, meeting reporting requirements all the way down to specifics such as how to choose correct output formats based on the rendering extension functionality.

With the plethora of best practice guides available, the thing that stands out the most is how each different vendor implements their own best practices and how that information highlights features of their business reporting solutions.

One of the most complex and well known business reporting firms is Crystal Reports. They have a reputation for having very powerful business reporting tools, but they can be complicated to use, especially for those who don’t have much of a technical background.  Additionally, their best practices guides can be just as complicated as their business reporting software.  So if you want to use Crystal Reports, you need to allow for a fair amount of training as well as an investment of time and effort into understanding their package.

BIRT, another set of business reporting tools, has a best practice concept that revolves around training which usually involves two days of classroom instruction and three days of hands-on training with guidance from expert users. Their report design fact sheet goes over how users can get the most out of BIRT including integrating images into your reports and using parameters to control report behavior. A company that co-leads with BIRT is Actuate Corporation actually provides the training and service on-site.

Then there's the approach taken by such business reporting companies as Windward Reports. Windward presents a wide range of best practices guides that cover all aspects of reporting, from the general "what makes a great report" to the specifics on how to use Windward's software to its best advantage. For example, one of the white papers offered on Windward's web site discusses in-depth the seven key features that make a usable report. Company documentation includes a learning center with tips for tasks like designing business financial reporting templates and creating reports with Excel's built-in tools. And the knowledge base has articles like the one on how to make output report as pixel-to-pixel identical as possible when creating a template.

Windward Reports is another company that produces business reporting software using a somewhat different approach. They present a wide range of best practice guides that covers all areas of business reporting. From “what makes a great report” to specific ways to use their software to its best advantage, they offer a lot more flexibility than other companies. One of the white papers by Windward goes over seven essential features that make up a usable report. Documentation shows you how to do things like designing a business financial report template and how to create reports with