InSite has a transactional database which could theoretically be used for reporting and excel, however the relationship between tables is too complicated for a layman to learn quickly, plus the performance of reports would be undesirable.
This was a problem faced by many computer systems, not just InSite, so the boffins at Microsoft and other large data basing companies came up with the ideas of “Data Warehouses” and “Cubes”.
What happens is, a process that runs regularly, that gets any differences in data, copies them, in a simplified format, to the Data Warehouse. The numbers are pre-summarized and counted in every way you can possibly imagine so that when you want to get a sum of, say, hauled tonnes for a specific day this calculation has already been done for you, and it retrieves it at lightning speed.
InSite users can utilize this functionality most easily by connecting to the Cube (which provides a friendlier interface to the Data Warehouse) in Microsoft Excel.
I’ll show you how to do this now. Requirement: InSite access on your network.
From Excel, go to the “Data” tab
.