Creating reports from scratch - Step 7 - Groupings

This guide is the third guide in a series of eight. The other guides in this series are:

• Creating reports from scratch - Introduction
• Creating reports from scratch - Step 1 - Titles and Topics
• Creating reports from scratch - Step 2 - Effective Date
• Creating reports from scratch - Step 3 - Select columns
• Creating reports from scratch - Steps 4 & 5 - Ordering and sorting columns
• Creating reports from scratch - Step 6 - Filters
• Creating reports from scratch - Step 7 - Groupings

• Creating reports from scratch - Step 8 - Collations and reviewing your report

   

Introduction

By default, each row in your report displays data about the individual people or things you have selected with your filters and report focus. Adding groupings allows you to bunch all the individual results within a report into categories or clusters. 

For example, you might want to group a report about 'Students' by sex, EAL, FSM or Year Groups to see data about all of the students in each group as one cluster, rather than individually. If you think of your report focus as a library, adding a grouping is like instructing to report writer to bundle all of the books of a certain genre or by a specific publisher together.

Step 7 is where you can define these groups. 

If you wish to keep your rows as they are, click the green Next button to skip this step.


 

Completing Step 7 

To add a grouping:

• Click the Group by drop-down.
• Type the name of the type of group(s) you want to cluster in your report in the box, or select this from the drop-down list.
• Click Add Grouping.

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  • If you see a Date range section on the slide-over, this allows you to set the dates between which you want your report subjects to be grouped. In essence, the range lets you specify between which dates your report subjects are considered to be in the cluster if the group's memberships can change over time.
    
    For example, if your report is about students in the Current Academic Year, but you want to cluster the students in your report by the year groups they were in last year, you set your relative dates for the grouping to Previous academic year.
    
    
     
  • If you see other drop-downs on the slide-over, these are used to narrow down what to 'group by' even further than just by date. If these drop-downs have an asterisk (*) next to them, you are required to pick an option in the drop-downs before you can proceed.
    
    For example, for a Demographics grouping, you see a Pick demographics drop-down as well as an Also include Inverse demographics drop-down; both of these are required. 
    
    The first of those lets you select which demographics you want to see as a cluster in your report. The second allows you to easily specify if you want the students who are not in those demographic groups to have their own separate clusters.
    
    
• Click Save to confirm your settings and add the grouping. 
   

To add a second grouping (if you don't see a second 'Group by' drop-down), click the green +add another button to make another Group by drop-down appear.

Please note: adding more than two groupings in one go is not advisable, as this often leads to inconsistent results in your report. The maximum number of groupings you can add to your report is three.

Once you are happy with your groupings, click the green Next button to proceed to the final step of the setup wizard (Step 8 - Collations and viewing your report).