Reporting provides a way for you to explore, analyze, and then save and share your data with others. It's important to understand how information is collected and its various relationships to get the report that you are looking for.
Terminology
To understand the basic functionality of reports, you must understand two items:
Dashboard - a data visualization that holds charts and text, collected and arranged on a single screen.
Question - a single query, its results, and its visualization.
For a more in depth look at terminology, check out our full list of basic terms.
Navigation
Fresh out of the box, reports will show you a few things:
The "Getting Started" folder which will contain a number of pre-built questions and dashboards curated by Riipen that we think will be useful to you.
A navigation sidebar that lists:
Home button to return to your Getting Started folder.
Collections, where you’ll store all of your questions, and dashboards.
Your personal collection - where you can store any questions or dashboards you are creating but do not wish to share with anyone.
Getting Started - as mentioned above.
[Portal Name] reports - where you can share any questions or dashboards with other administrators from your portal.
Data section, which lists all of the raw data sources.
Dashboards & questions
To get started with dashboards, click on your "Getting Started" collection to find all of your pre-built dashboards.
Click on a dashboard to view its contents.
Each dashboard will have its own unique set of filters which you can use to further filter any of the available data by dates, values, sizes, etc.
When viewing a dashboard, you can also drill into each individual question simply by clicking on the card for a specific view of that question.
Asking questions
Click on "+ New" button, and select "Question". You can start a new question from:
A raw data table
A previously saved question
For now, let’s start from "Riipen Platform > Experiences". The query builder will now open.
Filtering data
The Experiences table has all information regarding individual experiences within your portal. Let’s say you want to know:
How many experiences have been published with a program learner size greater than 20?
More precisely, this question translates to: “How many records (or rows) are in the Experiences table that have a State field value of "published" and have a value greater than 20 in the Program Learner Size field?”
To find out, you want to filter the data by the fields you’re interested in, which in this case are the State and Program Learner Size fields. Then you want to count the filtered rows.
In the "Filter" step, you’ll click the "Add filters to narrow your answer" button, and you’ll select
Stateas the field to filter on.In the drop down menu, select "published".
Additionally, you will add another filter using the same process, but this time select the "Program Learner Size" field, change “Equal to” to “Greater than”, enter 20 in the input field, then click "Add filter".
Previewing results
With each step, you can click on the triangle on the right to preview the results so far.
To close the preview, you can click on the "X" in the upper right of the preview.
Summarizing data
When you ask things like “how many,” “what’s the total,” “what’s the average,” etc., you’re talking about summarizing data. That is, you’re talking about metrics. The metric in this case the number (or count) of experiences after you’ve applied your filters.
Click the "Pick the metric you want to see" button in the "Summarize" step and select "Count of rows".
To bring it all together, click "Visualize".
You will now see your final result for your question.
Grouping results
While our previous total count is useful, it would be even more useful if you knew when these experiences happened, more specifically, if you knew how many published and greater-than-20 program learner size experiences were started each month.
You can return to the editor by hitting the back button, or by clicking on the "Editor" button in the upper right (the icon looks like a bulleted list). Alternatively, you can also click on the "Filter" and "Summarize" buttons to revise our question while staying on this page.
Since you want to group our results by month:
Click the button "Pick a column to group by" in the Summarize section.
You will now see a list of all the columns that you can use to group data together with. The column you want to group by is Start Dates because grouping by the experiences’ start date will give us separate counts of experiences over 20 program learner size for each month, based on when each experience started.
Select
Start Date,Click "Visualize"
You will now see a line chart of the experiences over time. The default grouping for dates is by month, but if you wanted to group by date, week, year, or something else, you could do that by clicking "by month" next to Start Date and selecting a different option from the drop down.
You can keep tweaking our question using the sidebar, or return to your notebook by clicking on the "Editor" button
Sharing
You can use reports all on your own, but they become even more useful when you start sharing your answers with other people.
To share you work, do any of the following and be sure to save the results to your portal's shared folder.
Saving questions
Sometimes you’ll find yourself asking certain questions again and again, whether it’s running regular reports, looking up something about an important segment of users, or just answering the same question for other people in your team. To keep from repeating the same set of steps each time you want to ask the same question, you can save your questions to use later.
To do this:
Click on the "Save" button in the top-right of the query builder.
Creating a dashboard
Dashboards are great when you have a set of answers that you want to view together. Your saved questions will be displayed as cards on the dashboard, which you can resize and move around.
To create a dashboard:
Click the "+ New" button
Select "Dashboard"
From here, add questions by clicking the "+" button. Once questions are added, you can modify their look and behavior to your exact specifications.
Don’t forget to click "Save" at the top to save your work when you’re done.
Additional resources
Under the hood, Riipen uses a business intelligence tool called Metabase. Here are some great resources to help you with your reporting needs from Metabase's help documentation: