Document Creation Guide

This guide is the primary resource for you to use to learn about designing and creating MicroStrategy Report Services documents using MicroStrategy Developer. It builds on the basic concepts about documents presented in the Getting Started with Documents section of the MicroStrategy Web help, which helps document designers understand how end users will use documents for data analysis. The chapters, which are described below, are organized to help guide you through creating a new document, from creating the document itself, to adding objects to the new document, and formatting the document and its objects:

• Designing and Creating Documents begins with a brief review of basic concepts, such as executing and printing documents, that are covered in the MicroStrategy Web help. The chapter is focused on creating new documents, so it includes procedures and best practices to create and design documents.
• Adding Text and Data to Documents discusses how datasets provide the data for the document and how multiple datasets are joined in the document. The chapter includes procedures to work with datasets, to import data, and to create many of the objects that make up documents, such as text fields, images, and shapes.
• Displaying Reports in Documents: Grid/Graphs describes Grid/Graphs, which display reports in a document. The chapter provides instructions to create and format Grid/Graphs.
• Formatting Documents describes how to format the document and its objects.
• Grouping and Sorting Records in a Document explains how to group and sort documents. Grouping defines the document's hierarchy and therefore its sort order. You can select which elements, or subsets of data, to display in the document.
• Linking from Documents explains how to connect a document with a report, a web page, or another document, passing parameters to answer any prompts that are in the target. Use links as a tool to present investigative workflows, such as navigating from data at one level to different levels of aggregation.
• Transaction-enabled Documents explains how to create a document that uses Transaction Services to embed write-back functionality into documents, for the purposes of decision-making or initiating a transaction.
• Adding Additional Usability Features to Documents provides steps to add additional features to documents, such as adding multiple "pages" of content to a multi-layout document or defining default prompt answers.
• Improving Document Performance describes ways to improve document execution performance by defining options such as whether documents load and display content in batches or all at once.

Most of the tasks in this guide are performed in MicroStrategy Web. Some are performed in MicroStrategy Developer, and are clearly labeled. You can also design and create documents using MicroStrategy Developer. The concepts are the same, but the procedures differ slightly. For steps, see the MicroStrategy Developer help.