Sometimes you need to use a BI tool and not the CRM report writer to accomplish your goals.
We sometimes use Jasper Reports to present visualisations in a Dashlet. The below example is an upsell report showing gaps in the services we may sell to clients. I show it only as an example of the possibilities with BI that inbuilt reporting tools just cannot produce (all of them)
If you want to produce reports like this you will need to:
- Install Jasperserver Community Edition on a server somewhere [free]
- Use something like Jasper Studio or iReports to build a report on your local PC (you then publish the report to your jasperserver). [free]
- Learn how to use the above
You can then run the report by passing a URL. Put the URL in a Dashlet.