SuiteAnalytics Sneak Peek: NetSuite 2021 Release 2 Expands Workbook Capabilities

SuiteAnalytics is a powerful tool for visualizing and gaining insights into your business data. By providing real-time ERP data to tables, pivots and charts within easy-to-understand dashboards, it’s a superior tool to alternatives like Excel. In NetSuite 2021 Release 2, SuiteAnalytics delivers new enhancements, making it easier to create reports and make data discovery and visualization even more powerful.

• Connecting multiple datasets into a single table or Workbook pivot tableMost SuiteAnalytics users are familiar with datasets and Workbook data visualization. Datasets uses the NetSuite data model to create automatic joins between records.

  However, users need to explicitly join two datasets to display data in a single Workbook table or Workbook pivot. A common denominator is required to combine multiple datasets. For instance, an ID or a date in both datasets (records and their fields). Typical use cases include “budget vs. actual,” “planned vs. actual” or “reported vs. completed” types of reports.

In this release, two datasets can also be programmatically joined by using an enhanced SuiteScript API and displaying the results in a Workbook Table or Workbook Pivot Table. As an example, here is a SuiteScript template to demonstrate the dataset linking two datasets (Employee Record and Transaction) shown in a Workbook.

• Data export from WorkbookNetSuite 2021 Release 2 also expands the ability to process, integrate and examine Workbook data in third-party applications by introducing a comma separated values (CSV) format export from the Workbook UI.

  With CSV data export, the data from real-time Workbooks can be used in non-real time scenarios, such as formatting for a PowerPoint presentation, creating highly customized charts in Microsoft Office, sharing data with users with no NetSuite access, machine learning data processing or simply archiving a snapshot of the Workbook pivot report.

  The CSV export is now available for datasets and pivot table and is a one-click action.

• Performance improvementsSometimes, Workbooks need to process very large datasets or perform complex calculations, which may result in a slower rendering. To cover scenarios like this, NetSuite has added the ability to cache datasets on demand. This enables fast response times for near real-time data (maximum of one hour old) when opening or manipulating Workbook tables or charts.

  The dataset cache is an optional feature. When cached mode is active and you need to load the latest available data, NetSuite provides an option to enforce a data refresh at any time.

In addition to these new features, NetSuite has added a few minor SuiteAnalytics UI improvements, and provided better translation support for portlets, SuiteScript API improvements and bug fixes.

The version of SuiteAnalytics will be automatically activated on all accounts upon upgrade.

This post was originally posted on the NetSuite Blog. By Himanshu Pande , Senior Principal Product Manager, SuiteAnalytics, Oracle NetSuite