What's New in 1.5

The 1.5 version of Insight A2 further increase the possibilities of visually analyzing corporate data. Below you can find a few examples of the new features of 1.5.

Dynamically Calculated Fields

With the help of dynamically calculated fields, users can create new categorical or numerical fields in Insight A2 without having to change the structure of their source database. A dynamic field is defined with a formula that may contain any mathematical expression, functions and references to other fields (eg: IIF([Margin] > 0.012, ‘High Margin’, ‘Normal Margin’)). No programming skills are required to define such formula.

		Dynamically Calculated Fields
				Insight A2 has more than 60 built-in statistical, trigonometric, date/time and string manipulation functions.

Joining Database Tables

Previous versions of Insight A2 could handle only a single database table (e.g. Orders), while the new version is capable of joining an arbitrary number of database tables directly (e.g. Orders + Clients + Sales Persons). Users also have the option to define which fields should be available for analysis, which is a great advantage in the case of a large number of fields.

		Joining Database Tables
				This feature greatly increases the number of questions that may be answered during an analysis session, as all the categorical and numerical data fields in the joined database tables are at once accessible.

Period to Date Calculations

With the new Year-to-Date, Quarter-to-Date and Month-to-Date calculations the time to create comparison reports along dates are greatly reduced. These functions can be used with the already available Financial Year calculations.

		Period to Date Calculations
				With the new PTD calculations users can simulate arbitrary period end dates, which is a convenient feature when creating historical reports.

Additional New Features in 1.5

• Tighter integration with Microsoft Office - The new version of Insight A2 is more closely integrated with Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. Both the visualizations and the underlying aggregated and non-aggregated data can now be exported to Microsoft Office applications in various formats. With one mouse click, users can export several visualizations at once, allowing them to create multi-page Excel workbooks and PowerPoint slide shows.
• Exporting visualizations in vector format - Apart from the bitmap image format, visualizations can now be exported in vector, metafile format. This format can be used when the exported visualizations will be resized or printed, because these operations would otherwise result in loss of image quality.
• Enhanced reporting mode - When reasonably possible, the new version eliminates the overlapping text problem of certain semi-textual report types found in previous versions
• Complete support for IBM DB2 databases
• Password-protected workspaces
• Improved user interface