Enterprise reporting supports Business Intelligence by delivering the detailed information that impacts the decision maker's reliance on flexible reporting systems, which present business data in the most consumable format for day-to-day operations. The source for reporting is any transactional system that you use for sales, logistics, and inventory, among others; the opportunities are endless.

For example, reports can be used for production and operational data, invoices, statements and business reports, such as Profit and Loss (P&L) statements, and performance and statutory reports.

MicroStrategy provides a powerful platform for scorecards and dashboards that consolidate and arrange numbers and metrics on a single screen.

Scorecards and dashboards may be tailored for a specific role and display metrics targeted towards a single point of view or department.

The Business Intelligence dashboard is often confused with the scorecard. The main difference between the two, traditionally, is that a Business Intelligence dashboard, like the dashboard of a car, indicates the status of the data at a specific point in time and the trending of data. A scorecard, on the other hand, displays progress towards a specific goal over time.

MicroStrategy supports advanced and predictive analysis capabilities, enabling users to perform analyses such as hypothesis testing, churn prediction and customer scoring models within a single interface.

MicroStrategy has built-in support for more than 300 mathematical, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), financial, and statistical functions.

A closed-loop BI is the capability of transforming a BI report's ready-only data into interactive reports that allow the user to capture strategies and data to trigger actions. This provides support to the related data source.

Inventory reports are natural candidates for closed-loop BI; you can change the goal in an inventory report, and based on the metric the system triggers actions to achieve it.

High-performance BI is focalized on large amount of data (terabytes, petabytes) without compromising the performance and usability of the reports and dashboards.

Financial risk processes and high-tech applications are the main candidates for these capabilities.

Big Data is about managing large, complex-structured (sales reports) and non-structured (social networks consumer behaviors) data.

This book is focused on helping you understand and use the reports and dashboard capabilities of the MicroStrategy platform in Cloud with a do-it-yourself approach.

As a first step, you need to enable your MicroStrategy-platform Cloud service (if you are a MicroStrategy customer, proceed with the enablement using your username and password delivered by MicroStrategy); the detailed instructions and prerequisites are located in Appendix A, MicroStrategy Express.

Enabling and using the MicroStrategy Cloud service is as easy as working with the Excel application, and moreover, Cloud applications have very easy and precise steps for performing any task.

The end user interface (menus, options, and so on) in the MicroStrategy Cloud platform (Internet based) will be very familiar to you. Please keep in mind that the final objective is that you will be able to design, build, analyze, and share reports and dashboards to leverage MicroStrategy from your own desktop/mobile device.