Reports and dashboards have different use cases. Reports are a place to ask a question while dashboards can be though of as saved answers. In reports you analyze data and and ask questions using filters. Unlike dashboards that can have data from any area of your business, reports focus on specific data sets.
Note: Most of the reports that you'll need come pre-built out of the box. You can find them in the 'Reports' index of the platform.
When to create reports?
There are 2 main scenarios where you may want to create your own reports.
To customize the view of the report that your dashboard gadget drills down to,
To have a custom view of a report that you'd like to analyze.
How to create a report?
For both scenarios mentioned above, the best starting point for creating a report is an existing report.
From the 'Reports' index, find the report that you want to customize.
For example, you want to have a simpler view of the 'Revenue by Customer and Lane' report, and you'd like to drill down to it from a dashboard gadget.Once you've opened the report, click 'Save As' from the report's menu at the top right corner.
Enter a new title, set the Access level and click 'Save'. This will bring you to the copied report which you can now edit.
Let's say you want to remove a few gadgets from this report and add new ones. On the copied report, click 'Edit' from the report's hamburger menu at the top right corner. This puts the report into edit mode.
Click on the 'X' on the top right corner of the gadgets you'd like to remove. Resize other gadgets by dragging the bottom right corner of the gadget and then Save your changes by clicking 'Save' on the top right corner of the report.
If you'd like to add new gadgets to the report, from the report's menu, click 'Add widget'.
Select the desired gadget from gallery. Filter by chart type & dataset to narrow down the options or use the search functionality to search for a gadget.
Note: When adding gadgets to a report, their scope & filtering is common to the whole report.