Report Designer BI overview

Report Designer BI

Report Designer BI is an optional service that organizes and publishes your EnergyCAP energy and billing data for easy visualization and analysis with third-party tools such as Tableau, IBM Cognos Analytics, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft Excel.

Your data is provided in a well-documented and easy-to-understand data model that easily integrates with your existing business intelligence (BI) tools and workflow. EnergyCAP utilizes Microsoft Analysis Services to provide your data in a standard format to easily connect with a variety of tools and systems—letting you focus on analysis instead of a complex data workflow.

Report Designer BI data model

The data model available with Report Designer BI includes your accounting, billing, facility, and sustainability data to make visualizing and analyzing data even easier. 

EnergyCAP provides the most recent five full calendar years of billing data and the most recent 13 months of interval data.

Data types include:

  • Bills
  • Bill line items
  • Meter use and cost
  • Building and organization use and cost
  • Account use and cost
  • Cost center use and cost
  • Vendor use and cost
  • GL subcode and accounting export information
  • Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per building
  • Channels and interval data
  • Daily weather data
  • Building and meter groups
  • Topmost place and cost center information

How is Report Designer BI different from the built-in dashboards and reports in EnergyCAP?

With Report Designer BI, you can create custom visualizations and organize data in ways that work best for your organization. You have the flexibility to structure data in ways that “fit” just for your organization.

Report Designer BI also lets you integrate your EnergyCAP data with the BI tools you’re already using. There’s no need to learn another tool or buy another BI product. Your existing BI team can now extend your data analysis to include EnergyCAP data without the need for any complex workflow processes or reformatters.

Report Designer BI availability

Report Designer BI is an optional service available to all EnergyCAP-hosted customers. For more information, contact EnergyCAP’s Sales Team.

What’s the difference between Report Designer BI and previous versions of Report Designer?

Previous versions of Report Designer provided flexibility to create charts and analyze data within Microsoft Excel. This functionality required a specific version of Excel (64-bit) and an EnergyCAP custom add-on to Excel. Processing speed was also limited by the your hardware configuration.

With Report Designer these limitations are removed. All data is now stored in a central service and analysis and processing uses our server resources—providing a consistent experience, regardless of your computer hardware.

Because we’re using a standards-based data model and industry-supported services, you’re now able to analyze and visualize your EnergyCAP data with the BI tools that you’re currently using (no longer limited to Excel).

If you’ve been using prior versions of Report Designer, you’ll want to transition to our new Report Designer BI data model and services. Our data dictionary includes information to help you transition from old table and field names to the latest data model.

The Report Designer 2.0 service and Microsoft Excel add-on will be supported through the end of October 2021. At that time, Report Designer BI will be the only supported toolset.

Contact EnergyCAP’s Technical Support Team for your Report Designer BI connection and login information.

Getting started

Contact EnergyCAP’s Technical Support Team for your connection and login information. You’ll use this connection information to connect your BI tools to the Report Designer BI data model.

We’ve also provided sample visualization files using Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Excel to demonstrate how you can organize and view your data with Report Designer BI’s data model. These are real files—add your specific connection information to see your data.

Technical details

The Report Designer BI service is hosted by Microsoft Azure Analysis Services. Data is available by way of XML for Analysis (XMLA) and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) standards-based formats. The published data model includes over 30 data tables and relationships. Data is refreshed daily.

If you use a stand-alone version of Micrcosoft Office and experience connections issues you many need to install the appropriate MSOLAP driver. The driver and installation instructions are here.

Limitations - Azure GovCloud and Tableau Cloud

  • Due to limitations and restrictions with Azure for US Government (Azure GovCloud), you may run into issues sharing reports and dashboards with data sourced from Report Designer BI. If your tenant has within Azure GovCloud, please reach out to EnergyCAP Support. 
  • Due to Tableau Cloud’s limited support for Microsoft Analysis Services, additional support will be required from Salesforce / Tableau Support.

How can I get extra help?

EnergyCAP is available to help create visualizations and construct data tables using tools like Microsoft Power BI Desktop and Microsoft Excel. Contact EnergyCAP’s Sales Team for additional details.

Webinar

Report Designer BI webinar and live demonstration.