Tabular Displays & AD Hoc Reports

About

An often overlooked aspect of item banking systems is their ability to provide ad hoc information in response to unpredictable requests during the business day. Ad hoc requests occur randomly, and the information needed is impossible to predict in advance. The best a business can wish for is an item banking system whose designers have done everything possible to make responding to ad hoc requests as painless as possible.

Pro!’s designers have foreseen the problem of ad hoc requests and have devised a solution based on the tabular display. A tabular display is a list of items presented in row and column format. Most ad hoc requests concern lists: how many items were written last month, how many items are in rewrite, which ADA forms were used in last year’s administration, etc. By provisioning tabular displays with uncommon and powerful features, Pro! provides the answers to these questions quickly and easily without resorting to screen prints and other older methods.

Early tabular displays had a fixed number of columns in a fixed order. Rudimentary sorting was sometimes available, but searching, filtering, and grouping were not. Their format was set, too; if you wanted a column added to a tabular display, programmers had to change the application.

The general public was introduced to tabular displays when spreadsheet programs like VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, and Excel became popular with general computer users. Spreadsheets presented information in a tabular display so naturally that the general public now considers them a birthright.

From the outset, though, spreadsheets beat the old tabular displays hands down. You could move columns around and sort with ease. What’s more, the features increased as the spreadsheet programs improved over time. Today, a powerful spreadsheet like Excel has many more capabilities than the typical user can name.

Programmers began incorporating some of the powerful features of spreadsheet programs into their tabular displays. Features like sorting and searching are still hallmarks that distinguish today’s more powerful tabular displays from the earlier implementations.

Eventually, advancement in the tabular displays found in application programs virtually halted. There are exceptions, to be sure, but the true power of this data presentation format has been untapped. Until now.

Pro! relies heavily upon tabular displays to present a list of data. However, Pro!’s tabular displays take users to the next level in data management — exceeding the capabilities of even the most advanced programs. Let’s take a look.

Features of Pro!’s Tabular Displays

Tabular Displays

Pro! tabular displays have the same appearance and features throughout. The user can drag columns into a pleasing order and sort the entire matrix in ascending or descending order on any column.

Sort

The user can sort on one column or multiple columns. Sorting multiple columns has the effect of sorting first by column A, then by column B, and so on. For example, a tabular display can be sorted by author, item date, and status.

Filter

Going beyond the ordinary, the user can create filters, which eliminate from view rows whose content does not match the filter criteria. (The rows are hidden and redisplayed if the user clears the filter.) A filter has three levels of comparison representing increasing levels of capability.

The first and simplest filter is direct selection. Pro! displays all of the distinct values in the column. The user selects the value(s) of interest, and only rows containing the selected value(s) are displayed. For example, if the filter is on item status, the distinct values might be Pending, Pretest, and Operational. Selecting Pretest displays only rows for items whose status is Pretest. Similarly, selecting Pretest and Operational displays only rows in which the item’s status is Pretest or Operational.
The second form of filter adds more capability. Pro! again finds the distinct values, and the user selects one or more of them, but additionally the user chooses a comparison and enters a comparison value. For alphabetical data, the comparison includes equal, not equal, contains, does not contain, starts with, or ends with. For numeric and date data, the comparison includes equal, not equal, greater than, less than, greater than or equal to, or less than or equal to.
The third and final level of filter builds upon and adds capability to the second level. In the third level, the user adds a second comparison that follows the comparison made in the second level. This additional comparison requires another selection of comparison (i.e. equal to, contains, etc.) and another value. As a final step, the user chooses whether the connection between the first and second comparisons is AND or OR. By adding another comparison, the user can create more complex filters. Returning to and building upon our example of filtering for item status, adding a second comparison lets the user display all rows in which the status is not equal to Pretest AND is not equal to Operational.

And most powerfully, the user can filter by multiple columns simultaneously. This feature can be used, for example, to filter for all items with a status of Pending written by Mary Smith or John Doe before a given date.

Group

Grouping is a very powerful feature. Suppose, for example, the user performs a search for items authored yesterday. The search will return items from all item writers. To group the display by item writer, all that’s needed is to drag the Item Writer column into the Grouping control. The result is items grouped together by Item Writer. Each group can be expanded or contracted—a contracted group showing only a header. In addition, grouping by multiple columns is supported. This allows the user, for example, to group the list of items authored yesterday by item writer and then by their current status.

Change Columns

Every tabular display shows a default set of columns our designers have selected for best effect. Acknowledging that a fixed set of columns is never right 100 percent of the time, Pro!’s designers allow each user to include other columns in the tabular display. With a simple click on an icon, Pro! lists all of the columns available. The user adds or subtracts columns to fit their needs, and the tabular display is redrawn with the columns chosen. For example, the item search returns a tabular display of items that meet the search criteria. But Pro! displays only enough columns of item information that fits comfortably on the screen even though Pro! keeps many data elements about an item. Using this feature, the user can add these additional columns to the display. This is especially helpful when exporting item data to a spreadsheet.

Export and Report

Pro!’s tabular display is powerful, but up to this point, nothing has been said about making a tangible report from the visual display (while avoiding screen prints). The natural answer was to add export and reporting power to this already rich system feature.

Pro! can export any tabular display as an Excel or CSV file and print any tabular display to a Word or PDF file. Whether exporting or printing, the user has the option of choosing the visible columns to be included. When printing, the user can also include a page header, page footer, page numbers, or all three. Export and report generation run in the background; the user can continue working while they are prepared. When notified that the request is complete, the user can view the output, save it, or both. A final note: when Pro! produces a report in Word format, the user can easily attach Pro!’s output to a nicely formatted title page, which makes ad hoc reports prepared for executives and boards more professional looking.

In Summary

Pro! is designed by test development professionals to help them do their job quickly and efficiently.

You can display the data elements you need concerning items and other entities (e.g. administrations, committee reviews, etc.), and then filter, sort, and group the data to fit that particular need.

By using the full capability of tabular displays, Pro! users can respond to ad hoc requests for reports and exports from the item banking system. Reports are provided in Word or PDF format, and exports are provided in CSV or Excel format.

Want to get a closer look at Pro!

Contact us and schedule a demo!

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