The ability to download grid data into an Excel document has been a feature of Nitro App Builder for quite some time.  Indeed, when someone wants to massage or analyze numbers in their own world, Excel is an ideal tool to accomplish that.

If your company's ERP system dates back to the AS/400 glory days, your users are likely accustomed to running programs that generate "old school" spool file output.  While working with printed reports was quite common in the past, today most users prefer to work in a more paperless fashion, opting for on-screen apps or downloaded spreadsheets wherever possible.

Your IBM i HTTP Server powered by Apache is a powerful web-serving system akin to a bank staffed with multiple fast-working tellers. The AJAX requests coming in from your front-end apps are like customers entering the bank to perform transactions. Each "customer" queues up in an orderly line on a first-in/first-out basis, and is serviced by the next available "teller" as soon as they're finished dealing with the prior customer.

Nitro Query apps containing charts or graphs can make conveying your company's business trends or performance metrics much more effective than showing raw numbers alone.  It's particularly common (and easy) to create a dashboard app that includes a grid of monthly sales details supplemented by a chart showing month-to-month performance.  This adds some great context to the lists of numbers.

Just about every business has a situation where users need to perform a single process against multiple items in one pass.  For example, you might have a list of open invoices that you'd like to flag as ready for payment, or a group of inventory items that you would like to transfer out of a special holding area.

Wrapping up 2017 with a simple but powerful tip for Nitro Query grid apps... Very often lists of business data include columns that can be classified as boolean, with text representing values of yes/no, true/false, 1/0, etc.  When you're creating a Nitro Query grid app that includes such columns, you can make "truthy" values stand out much more clearly by replacing the column text with a visual checkmark. 

Power Servers running IBM i are remarkably stable systems, to such a degree that it's easy to overlook those rare occasions when something on the system has gone awry and requires operator attention. When an exception does occur, many IBM i sites have third party monitoring tools or home-grown software in place to notify system administrators that an issue has occurred that may require some kind of action. 

Whether you're a seasoned SQL pro or just learning the ropes of SQL syntax on IBM i, the SQL parser built into Nitro Query App Builder is an invaluable tool you can leverage to quickly generate a web-based report for your users, or even a file maintenance application containing multiple joined files. SQL-based data sources were introduced in Valence 5.1 back in May 2017, and the feature was formally removed from Beta status this month.

We're long past the days where a single on-site server could handle all the IT needs of a typical business.