Hi, Alan,
I also realise we will need to use the pro version of LimeSurvey to do all this.
There is no difference between Pro Edition and the CE Edition regarding features.
The Pro Edition is hosted by Limesurvey, the CE Edition you have to host (and maintain) by yourself.
So you pay for this comfort or convenience.
Okay, Reports:
When I read
Each finished report for each Tax office will look the same
I thought "Well, that's just a matter of filtering"
1. EXCEL - Pivot table
On Youtube you will find a lot of solutions. Just search for "Dashboard EXCEL".
One of my favorites is "MyOnlineTrainingHub" by Mynda Treacy.
And one more basic I found yesterday (German EXCEL version, but without sound, so international):
youtu.be/dKxETy8jLCk
In Pivot tables you add the entire data file and just filter by tax office number or whatever.
2. Also you will find a lot of online or desktop solutions. Here just a few.
IfaD Reportbook
FastReport Online
FastReport Desktop
Adobe ReportBuilder
Tableau
It's just a very small selection.
3. If you are a bit experienced in php and MySQL:
a. You can write your own report by querying the database and display the results with a chart library like "highchart.com" or others and save it as pdf (TCPDF library, or other)
b. Or write the results to a prepared EXCEL template (PHPExel, ...).
The EXCEL template contains the structure of the report, all charts and tables. Your program just pipes in the actual data.
4. Now I tell something we did last year in a similar case.
The reports (about 120 pages with 170 charts, some tables) were for a real lot of countries and regions of the world.
So we created a "dummy" report which contained all charts, tables with dummy data and the not changing text elements (the changing text just as placeholders)
It was a Word docx file.
As you might know the Microsoft "docx", "xlsx", ... files are just "zip" files with chanded extension.
So if you rename a docx file to *.zip" you can unzip and you will find a folder structure with lot of files.
And for each chart there is a single EXCEL-file.
Knowing this we created a small Delphi programm which
- renamed the "docx" to "zip" and unzipped
- opened the EXCEL files one after the other
- queried the database and entered the values into the EXCEL file
- closed and saved
- zipped everything again and renamed to "docx" (now with a different filename that reflected the country)
Was some work beforehand, but saved a real lot of time.
The analyst - only - had to write the texts.
Best regards
Joffm
P.S. Something general:
Very often I read here something like "I searched the forum, but did not find".
IMO this due to a bad headline.
You started with "... some basic questions".
But now we talk about reports and report builder, a very special thing.
IMO people should open a new thread with a new meaningful headline.