This article refers to Reporting Hub functionality in Elements v6.1 and later. Before this version, formatted reports had not yet been migrated into the Reporting Hub.

This article continues from the following article, which introduces several broad concepts relevant to dashboards as well as other forms of reporting in Elements:

• Introduction to the Reporting Hub

Elements formatted reports are customisable templates which generate paged formatted reports such as Word files. They are made accessible from within the Elements user interface. Designed and managed by nominated Reporting Hub administrators, they can be used to quickly generate Word, PDF, Excel, and CSV files for a targeted set of users of Elements.

Formatted reports are great at generating paged, formatted documents for direct export from the Elements user interface. They excel at layout of textual output and visual summaries of data using tabular and graphical visualisations, whether in PDF, Word or Excel formats. The CSV format supports only download of simple tabular data files.

However, formatted reports are not intended to be used to export very large amounts of data that have not been suitably aggregated (for example, tables with hundreds of thousands of rows of data or graphs with very many data points). They are also not intended to provide the ability to extract very large datasets from underlying data. Symplectic will be aiming to release separate reporting functionality to support the direct extraction of large datasets from the Elements user interface during 2021.

Please also see:

• Which Elements report type should I create?

All formatted reports source their data from the Elements Reporting Database. This database must be installed in order for all dashboards to function correctly. For clients hosting their own instances of Elements, please see the following support articles on how to install the Reporting Database:

• How to install the Reporting Database

Installation of this database is handled by Symplectic for hosted instances of Elements.

Formatted reports can be configured to report on specific types of Elements data. Currently, the Reporting Hub supports the following types of target for formatted reports. You will be asked to choose between them when registering a new custom formatted report.

A group report, when run, asks the user running it to choose a group in Elements on which to run the report. Only those groups for which the report is configured to run, and on which the viewing user has suitable data usage permissions, are offered.

A user report, when run, asks the user running it to choose a user in Elements on which to run the report. Only those users in groups for which the report is configured to run, and on which the viewing user has suitable data usage permissions, are offered. If the user has not been granted any specific roles, they will only be able to run the report against themselves.

A groups and users report, when run, asks the user running it to choose one or more groups and/or one or more users on which to run the report. Only those groups for which the report is configured to run, and on which the viewing user has suitable data usage permissions, are offered. Only those users in groups which the report is configured to run, and on which the viewing user has suitable data usage permissions, are offered.

Please see the Report Viewing and Running Permissions section of the following article for more information:

• Introduction to the Reporting Hub

Behind the scenes, Elements formatted reports are hosted and rendered using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). SSRS is a powerful and well-adopted reporting platform for which a large amount of documentation and training material can be found on the internet.

Elements formatted reports are authored directly in SSRS using the Microsoft SSRS Report Builder, a flexible and freely available drag and drop report designer. Once functioning within SSRS, the report is then registered in Elements for reuse within the Elements UI. Please see the following article for more information about this process:

• Designing and deploying SSRS formatted reports

During 2021, Symplectic plans to continue migrating existing stock and custom formatted reports into the Reporting Hub, this will include CVs and other user formatted reports, as well as Open Access request waivers and the various UK REF-related formatted reports.