Paola designed and built an ad-hoc reporting system using the existing Marketing Planning System built with Omnis and Sybase.

The system allowed users to create a custom report by selecting criteria. It then generated the report as a CSV file and opened automatically with Excel.

The marketing information included attributes of product, time, geography and a stored value (e.g., volume sold). The system presented this three-dimensional data as a series of two-dimensional tables.

Users could swap positions of time, geography and product on reports and see a sample layout on screen in real time. They could also add totals to rows or columns, remove detail rows (to just see column or row totals, or a single table total). Users could also add trend rows.

The system created a spreadsheet and exported it to Excel so that the user could do further analysis and create charts as required. The ad hoc report system was written to automatically adapt to changes in the underlying database; it did not require reprogramming when the database fields were renamed, added or removed.