Create Reports & Dashboards: http://www.appcloud101.com/archives/7556
Reporting vs Analytics
Force.com Reports lets you create complex reports & dashboards very quickly.
However Force.com Reports tool is designed to provide operational reporting on the Org data. To combine information from multiple data sources for ad-hoc query analysis you need other tools.
Salesforce Wave is one such tool which combines information from multiple sources in one data warehouse like environment for you to do
ad-hoc analysis and trend analysis. Wave gives you a unified view of your business as you have visibility into data from multiple corporate repositories.
An operational report as in Force.com report is often real time. An analytics dashboard contains data which is not real time but is based on data periodically loaded from operational data sources.
Salesforce VS Traditional Tools
Salesforce operational reports – Force.com Reports tool – is designed to be very simple to use. Using this tool, even business users can create very complex reports like matrix reports (group records both by row and by column) and more. However, unlike traditional data warehouses which combine data from multiple sources, Force.com Reports is designed for operational reports on one instance (Org) of salesforce only.
Salesforce Wave combines data from multiple sources so you have a unified view for your business. However, unlike traditional data warehouses, you don’t have to architect a data model in Wave. Wave works on a Google Search like approach, allowing you to quickly upload data in Salesforce Wave Cloud, which your users can then interact and explore on any device of their choice. This high speed search-based query technology radically reduces the time to go-live without worrying about months and years spent trying to architect – star-schema or snowflake- data models .