#happy2022workday day-064

Happy 2022 day-064! Today’s challenge…

A great comment on yesterday’s post from Susan Schutz led to today’s start at answering the first of her 5 questions (copied here, see below for more…):
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1. Is there a report that summarizes which reports haven’t been run in the last three months (for example) as well as the numbers of unique users that have accessed the report.
2. As an end user trying to find a report do the results only show reports that haven’t been archived and for which I have access to based on my security?
3. If a company is trying to get their arms around reporting is there a way to query which reports are using the same or similar fields to weed out and move to archive duplicates or reports that are accomplishing the same purposes?
4. If you wanted to add a naming convention when you are past implementation would each report have to be touched one by one to change the title or is there a way to accomplish a big list more quickly (perhaps a mass upload).
5. When a new report is requested is there an easy way to check the system to make sure there isn’t something similar which is active or archived?

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Reporting experts (as per her comment), please share your comments:

1. Use the “All Custom Reports” Report Data Source
2. There is a “Last Run Date” field on the “Custom Report” BO
3. Prompt for a date (which I defaulted to the example of 3 months ago)
4. When run, the default date can be modified if desired
5. For “…the numbers of unique users that have accessed the report” part of this question, there might be an easy answer which I don’t know about. Otherwise, next step could start with…..
6. This red line shows for the 1:M field an example with 3 Groups, and thus 3 lines of output. If there isn’t an easier approach, we next need some calc fields on the Members in the “Sharing – Groups Explicitly Specified” to count true totals that ignore duplicates.

But, let’s stop here because I don’t think that the true count is easy to obtain. Also, the true count likely isn’t needed for the spirit of the question.

Although I’m curious about easier answers (and the first to encourage “experts” to jump in with your answers or ideas), maybe another time we will continue this challenge, for pedagogical purposes. As for the spirit of the question, it’s probably more helpful to have a discussion on how live customers find themselves owning thousands of custom reports. And more to the point, is the total number of custom reports a problem?

I’ll weigh in with my “lazy answer”: Having thousands of custom reports doesn’t cause a problem. This isn’t job security for me (ha ha), as compared to admitting from experience that it isn’t easy keeping the number of custom reports minimized while maximizing reuse of existing reports.

Same question(s) about Calculated Fields instead of Custom Reports? That’s a related but different story with different answers!