Trends are a key metric in sales. They require period to period calculations. It's not unusual to get questions like these. How did we do against last quarter?  Against the same quarter a year ago?

Being able to answer them quickly and easily is important. Here's a simple report. Can the product you are looking at do it from the data as it is. Remember no DBA building new tables and no 3GL code.

Product Line Sales for Current Quarter

Product Line Unit Sales % Change from Last Qtr Product A 100,000 10% Product B 125,000 -2% Product C 135,000 15%

• Here's a little twist can you use the same code to provide a report with whatever the user wants - units, dollar volume, or margin?
• How about color coding the % change based on the value?
• Can you do a drill down from the products?
• How much effort is it going to be to turn this into a graph, a PDF file, or an Excel worksheet?
• Can you do inter-row calculations?
• Can you have hidden data for calculations?