The world of reporting is often divided into report authors, who are fully responsible for defining and preparing the reports, and report consumers, who focus solely on processing the information from the report. This can easily create a bottleneck in the report authoring process, since anything more complex than simply reordering or recomposing content from one or multiple static reports may require the report author's assistance. 

To mitigate such risks, Halo introduced the role of Storybuilder. Storybuilders can take any existing piece of content available to them and use it to create their own report. This keeps the report authors in control of the content available for reporting, while at the same time empowering the storybuilders to be in control of the narratives they want to present. Combined with flexible parameterization options and highly interactive visualization components, this makes it easy to reuse the once-defined content across multiple reports rather than focus on just exposing one ready-made narrative for other users.

Do you have users in your organisation who are responsible for building reports, but they may not have the skills or expertise to ensure the loyalty rate is calculated correctly? Storybuilding may be the perfect choice! They can build a completely new narrative, without having to author a single query. As long as they have access to other reports which can be considered reusable templates, or simply can find the slides they need in other reports they have access to, they can remix this content into a new story.

Storybuilding Interface

Storybuilding mode in Halo Reports builds upon the foundations defined by the Viewing mode. In addition to viewing available content, it focuses on two additional concepts:

  • Remixing the report - rearranging the content of the report, removing or duplicating pages and tables, and merging pages and tables from different reports into one.

  • Personalizing the report - having done the remixing, you can save your own copy of the report in the exact state that you want to have it, as well as further distributing your stories.

Impacting the report structure is possible for both slide-type and table-type pages:

In addition, the content can be neatly organized into groups.

If you have edit access to the specific document, Storybuilding mode can be used to overwrite the document. If not, Storybuilding mode still allows you to make your own copy of whatever document you’re looking at in order to treat it as a starting point for a completely new report! What is important, Storybuilding does not require you to have a full Authoring licence, nor understand the complexities of the queries behind the Pages or Tables they use! This remains in the authoring domain, keeping authors in full control over what others are using as building blocks for their reports, ensuring that, e.g., the corporate rules are correctly applied for any KPIs displayed in the report.

Sample use cases

When Storybuilding role come in handy? Basically, whenever you, as an author, want to empower the users to build and manage their own reports, without granting them rights to define their own queries or pages from scratch.

Cut the noise 

Default reports are long and complex, and users need their simplified copies - with Storybuilding, they can rearrange the content according to their needs, creating their own report, e.g., “Germany 2025 satisfaction report - highlights.”

The big picture

Default reports are distributed separately for each market (or other distinguishing factor) - with Storybuildings, users can combine content from those reports into a new document, e.g., “2025 satisfaction reports - Europe summary.”

Save your point of view

Default reports are distributed, taking advantage of Halo Reports parameterization options. In such a case, each report is saved in some default state, which can be changed by the user (for example, to a different market, different segment, or different product of focus). With Storybuilding, it is possible to save a copy with a specific state of the parameters for ease of return to the same analysis later on.

Building blocks

Rather than preparing ready-to-use longer reports, report authors can provide a more modular experience to their audience, preparing smaller building blocks for the Storybuilders to use in order to define their own narrative. This includes the possibility of defining editable chapter pages, granting the Storybuilders an option to build comprehensive presentations, with an Entry Page, Chapter Pages for chapters within the narrative, etc.

Since all content is created by the authors, whether longer reports or smaller “building blocks”, Storybuilders can feel confident that anything these pages show is in line with the corporate requirements. Report authors can ensure the quality of information provided before making it more broadly available, removing the risk of inconsistent calculations or visual aspects flooding the corporate content.

The Storybuilding capabilities cover both Tables and slide-type pages, so all the scenarios are applicable, no matter if the reports are defined in a more visual form, using charts, widgets, or infographics, or purely as flexible tables exposing the important calculation results.

Built-in parameter merge option allows the storybuilders to keep the flexibility of parameterization defined in the original reports, while being able to retain the easy-to-use option to regenerate the full report to a different context with one click.
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Any new document created with Storybuilding can be fully controlled by its creators in terms of organization within Content, as well as in terms of sharing with other users. Anything authored by Storybuilders can be shared with other users or predefined teams (with view-only or full edit rights) in the same way as the report authors can do it.
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Ready to tell your story? Visit our Learning Center and see how easy it is! Or contact our support team.