This lesson will guide you through the use of Magic Reports. Make sure to read through 'What you should know before building a Magic Report' to make yourself aware of what symbols and types of statements you should use to successfully generate your report.
Before You Begin
- Basic student info (student ID, student last name and student first name) columns are added AUTOMATICALLY to every report.
Things you should do:
- Split the sentence into fragments.
- It uses terms like comma, "and", etc. to divide up the sentence into things that it should try to add to the report.
- Commas always work best, they are the least ambiguous.
- Use the symbols > < = to make statements.
- Check each fragment for special search terms.
- Enrollment/Visibility: e.g. "2009 6th graders" will set visibility to the 2009 academic year, and filter enrollment to 6th graders.
- Teachers/Rosters: e.g. "5th period teachers" will add teacher name info and filter to 5th period.
- Separate the fragment into filter information and search terms that are used to locate the field in the meta data.
- If no filtering language is found, treat the field as display-only.
- The report builder recognizes a lot of variations in filtering language.
- For numeric filters, you can use plain language or math symbols (you will generally get better results using symbols).
- Search the meta data for the best match to the field name.
- The more specific you are, the better, especially with assessment fields.
- For example, if you need a score from an assessment, refer to the assessment and the score that you need.
- If a filter was provided, apply it to the field that was found.
Things you cannot do:
- Cannot do "or" statements; currently only "and" statements.
- Cannot say "mailing address" to get a contact's mailing info. You have to state the specific fields: address, city, state, zip, contact name, etc.
Where to Start
1. Click on the Reports tab.
2. Select Create a Magic Report.
Building your Magic Report
3. Type in the data for the columns you want provided on the report. For example, to get 2010 ELA CST English Learner students who scored BB and FBB, you would type: 2010 CST ELA performance level < 3 and english proficiency is 3.
4. Click Create a Report.
Suggested Columns
5. Once you click 'Create Report', 'Suggested Columns' will pop up with columns DnA matched to your search criteria. If you would like to use the columns suggested, simply click 'Build It!'
If you would like to change your selections, for example, you accidentally typed in 2010 CST ELA Performance Level instead of 2010 CST Math Performance Level, select the dropdown menu next to said column under 'or Select Something Better' to see other selections.
If these aren't what you're looking for at all, click on the X in the right corner to start over.
Viewing Report
Your report will generate as stated, with Student ID, Last Name, First Name, followed by the columns of data you typed in. You can then edit this like any other custom report via the tabs on top.
Next Steps
See the help document 'Edit A Custom Report' for more information on making alterations to a Custom Report.