Variables in Talis Decisions are well worth understanding, because they help greatly in producing polished reports. Variables are created by combining or manipulating “real” data brought back by a Universe query. Once created, variables can be used in charts and tables just like any other piece of data. Here are just three examples from many where variables can be useful:

• Deriving a postcode district from a full postcode
• Producing statistical output not available from the Universes such as mean, median, mode, standard deviations, variance etc
• Adding a fixed prefix to barcodes for loading to an RFID hand-held device

There are two new videos on the Video tab of the Talis Decisions site introducing the concept of Variables in Talis Decisions. [All the videos on this part of the Talis Decisions site are free to view. They are mostly about authoring reports in Web Intelligence and are in bite-sized chunks about 5 minutes long.]

If you create reports in Talis Decisions, all these videos are well worth a look if: and if you are becoming more sophisticated in your use of Talis Decisions but haven’t ventured into the use of variables, then the new variable videos will be particularly useful. As ever, any comments on the new videos will be gratefully received…..