Both Designer and Visualizer reports are both very powerful, and each have their strengths. When would you use Visualizer and when would you use Designer?
Visualizer Highlights
Visualizer is designed to be used by any business user for exploring data and sharing insights via dashboards. Visualizer helps business users to rapidly answer questions and discover information. You can add Visualizer reports to dashboards in the same way as Designer reports. Visualizer reports cannot be directly printed.
Interactive design: Visualizer has an intuitive interface that includes a search bar to easily find data elements, drag-and-drop design canvas, and rapid rendering so you can quickly see your visualizations.
Guided mode: Visualizer suggests chart types based on data combinations. Pick your data first, and let Visualizer help you make it look great.
Dashboards 2.0 integration: Visualizer reports are more tightly integrated with the new Dashboards 2.0.
Responsive design, adaptive layout: Along with Dashboards 2.0, Visualizer reports automatically adapt to various screen sizes to better support mobile viewing.
Edit in Visualizer: From a dashboard you can select a Visualizer report, edit it, and quickly return to the dashboard.
Export: You can export a Visualizer report from Dashboards 2.0 in Excel and PDF formats.
Productivity features: Visualizer includes productivity enhancers such as color palettes, percentage-across calculations, and quick access to the underlying BQL queries.
Designer Highlights
Use Designer to develop highly formatted enterprise reports that you want to print in a precise format, schedule for email delivery, or export. Designer is essentially a “design studio” for data analysts and other data savvy users to build rich and specific applications.
Pixel-perfect printing: Designer provides pixel-perfect, also called banded, layout capabilities.
Schedule and deliver: Designer provides advanced scheduling features including report-driven report distribution.
Subreports: Designer lets you put a report inside another report.
Export: Designer exports to
CSV, Excel, PDF, and PowerPoint formats. In Dashboards 2.0
you can export Visualizer reports to PDF and Excel.
Pivot control: Designer provides a pivot control widget to help you add attributes and measures, reorder columns, and change the structure to a pivot table. In Visualizer these features are supported by drag-and-drop and guided modes.
Chart Types
Commonly-used charts and tabular reports are available in both modules. Designer supports some charts that Visualizer does not, and vice-versa. See Supported Report Types.