What is a typical workflow with OracleBI Discoverer?

As you become more familiar with OracleBI Discoverer, you will find a workflow that suits you best. Typically, using OracleBI Discoverer is a three-stage process:

• "Stage 1: Getting the data you want"

• "Stage 2: Analyzing data"

• "Stage 3: Sharing data with other people"

Stage 1: Getting the data you want

When working with OracleBI Discoverer, you get the data you want by:

• using existing workbooks created by the Discoverer manager or by other Discoverer users

• creating new workbooks to analyze data in a new way using Discoverer Plus or Discoverer Desktop

Stage 2: Analyzing data

Your ultimate goal in using OracleBI Discoverer is to analyze data to arrive at a profitable business decision. To do this, you might ask yourself questions about your business. For example:

• What is the average time for a hospital stay for heart transplant patients?

• How many engineers have we hired in the last twelve months?

• Which telephone lines need greater bandwidth?

With Discoverer's data analysis tools, you can find the answers to these and other business questions by:

• pivoting data to create comparisons

• drilling up and down in data to see consolidated or more detailed information

• drilling out to analyze data in other applications

• creating totals, calculating percentages, and creating custom calculations

• displaying data visually in graphs and charts

The end result is a collection of worksheets and graphs that persuasively support your business decisions.

Stage 3: Sharing data with other people

When you have retrieved and analyzed data, you will probably want to share your results with other people at your organization, with customers, or with business partners.

If the people you want to share data with also use OracleBI Discoverer:

• you can share your Discoverer workbooks and worksheets with them (for more information about sharing workbooks, see "About sharing workbooks")

  Discoverer Plus users can open worksheets and save their own personal copy to the database. Discoverer Viewer users can view worksheets, and save their own personalizations (personalizations do not affect the source worksheets in the database).

• you can use Discoverer Portlet Provider to publish worksheets as portlets on Oracle Portal pages (for more information, see "Publishing worksheets to OracleAS Portal")

If the people you want to share data with do not use OracleBI Discoverer, you can export Discoverer worksheets in popular application formats (e.g. Microsoft Excel, HTML). For more information about exporting worksheets, see "About exporting Discoverer data to other applications".