What are workbooks?

Workbooks are Discoverer files that contain worksheets displaying data retrieved from the database. If you are familiar with spreadsheet applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel), think of a workbook as a spreadsheet file. Discoverer workbooks are stored in the database.

Workbooks typically contain data that is related in some way but organized to show different perspectives. For example, you might want to analyze different aspects of sales performance and create different worksheets for each aspect. For example (see figure below):

• a worksheet called Rank of Sales to calculate a ranked list of cities based on sales performance

• a worksheet called Top N/Bottom N to calculate the best sales performers and worst sales performers

• a worksheet called Moving Average to calculate a rolling three-month average for sales figures

Note: For more information about maximizing Discoverer performance, see "About designing workbooks for maximum performance".

Figure 6-1 A Discoverer workbook containing multiple worksheets

Description of the illustration wbfull2.gif

You use workbooks in the following ways:

• You can create your own workbooks that you can subsequently share with other Discoverer users. Or, you can use workbooks created by other Discoverer users or by the Discoverer manager. For more information about sharing workbooks, see "Sharing workbooks".

• You can include parameters to filter the workbook each time it is opened or refreshed. Including parameters enables workbook users to filter out data that they are not interested in and go directly to the data that they want to analyze. For more information about using parameters, see "Using parameters".

• You can save workbooks to the database using Discoverer Plus Relational, and open workbooks from the database.

• You can scheduled workbooks to processed at a particular time and frequency (for more information, see "Using scheduled workbooks").