Generating Visually Appealing Reports

nadman10 · 2014-07-17 14:02:09

I have a server that automatically emails me MySQL reports that I have sent to me in CSV format. Although the information is fine, it isn't a visually appealing report to distribute in meetings and conference calls. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to automatically generate reports that are less bland. My thought was outputting it in XML format and opening it in Word or something similar.

Thanks in advance.

Last edited by nadman10 (2014-07-17 14:02:41)

nadman10 · 2014-07-17 14:27:09

I think I may have answered my own question with this article:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1249 … p-in-linux

Last edited by nadman10 (2014-07-17 14:27:33)

drcouzelis · 2014-07-17 14:27:43

You can load CSV files in Excel. Does that work for you?

nadman10 · 2014-07-17 14:29:57

I would like something that is automatic and has very little to no human action involved. Opening CSV files in excel is kind of "ugly". Id like to have nice formatted tables and graphs(which Excel can do), but AFAIK that requires human interaction.

Last edited by nadman10 (2014-07-17 14:30:18)

Trilby · 2014-07-17 15:00:59

Latex - or even easier/better LaTex Sweave documents.

You can have a short simple template that will run R code to draw from whatever the most up to date csv file is, then create a report as a PDF - even with barcharts, scatter plots, or any other kinds of graphs you may want. Of course a nicely formatted table by itself would be quite simple.

nadman10 · 2014-07-17 15:03:24

Thank you. I will look into it. Printing HTML pages with tables and graphs directly from Chrome almost works, but cells get cut off at page breaks.

firecat53 · 2014-07-17 15:03:35

It's pretty easy to convert CSV into an HTML table and then add some CSS styling. To really get fancy you could also use something like wkhtmltopdf to transform that styled HTML into a nice portable PDF.

Scott

nadman10 · 2014-07-17 15:15:23

As I stated previously, HTML table cells are cut off between page breaks. I need them to be formatted neatly.

firecat53 · 2014-07-17 17:59:56

I'm talking about setting up a script to process the table directly from CSV all the way to PDF...no manual printing from Chrome or anything else required. I've been doing this for years with daily order reports. I'd share my code, but it's really specific and quite ugly (I was brand new to python at the time and minimally aware of things like libraries ).

Scott

Edit: something like this (not tested...3rd google result) with the HTML piped to this

Last edited by firecat53 (2014-07-17 18:03:08)

nadman10 · 2014-07-17 19:15:07

Ah, I see now. Thanks for the suggestion.

juna · 2014-07-22 12:52:31

If you know a bit of LaTeX you can easily make nice tables (and plots) from a csv using pgfplotstable (part of pgfplots).
See e.g. http://www.latex-tutorial.com/tutorials … /lesson-9/

bulletmark · 2014-07-22 13:30:03

I've struggled with various documentation producing solutions on linux for many years but never been happy with any of them. Then some years ago I discovered asciidoc which I use extensively now everywhere I can. So I'd consider creating a script which formatted your input (i.e. CSV and whatever) into asciidoc input format and then run asciidoc over it to produce pdf (and html if you want also). Asciidoc input is simple text markup language, e.g. like markdown. The PDF output, including colored headers, tables, annotations etc, looks great.

Arch Linux

#1 2014-07-17 14:02:09

Generating Visually Appealing Reports

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Re: Generating Visually Appealing Reports

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#9 2014-07-17 17:59:56

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#10 2014-07-17 19:15:07

Re: Generating Visually Appealing Reports

#11 2014-07-22 12:52:31

Re: Generating Visually Appealing Reports

#12 2014-07-22 13:30:03

Re: Generating Visually Appealing Reports

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