A quick note on Narratives

Narratives are very useful to give user information in a readable format. Some data is not easy to name so a more descriptive comment can be used instead of jus the column name
Consider:
Run Date
24/08/06

What does this mean?

You could use:

‘The date when the latest ETL was run is: 24 Aug 2006’


Obviously the more descriptive version in unusable as a column heading, therefore use a Narrative.

The narrative is a type of view that you add to a request. The formatting options are restricted to bold, italics and underline but you can play with the colours.

To produce the result above you would fill the main section (not the header and footer section) with the following

The date when the latest ETL was run is: [b]@1[/b]

Where [b] to make bold and @1 relates to field number one.

Placed on the top or bottom of a dashboard these narratives provide some unobtrusive feedback to the users. I normally build a dashboard which has repository variables displayed, and often put the Version Number variable onto a general tab.

told you it was a quick note!