BCA - Navigating Reports
About
This article and video tutorial (below) covers report navigation in BLUEcloud Analytics (BCA). You can bookmark the BCA login page for easy access later. If you don't know your BCA login, please open a help desk ticket.
Navigating Folders
The Shared Reports folder in BCA contains all reports built by MSC administrators for member libraries to run on demand.
These reports are grouped into folders based on function. Only MSC admins can edit folders and reports; however, you’re encouraged to open a help desk ticket when you have report modification requests or a report errors out.
For an overview of BCA and its report organization, see BCA - Overview.
Every folder and report in BCA is labeled with a title, description and last modified date.
The Libraries folder contains a folder for your specific library that only you have access to. This folder is where you’ll find reports built specifically for your library, including those that contain patron data. Please open a help desk ticket to request reports for this folder.
There are two types of reports: grid reports and graph reports. Open the Circulation Statistics folder for some examples. Grid reports have a spreadsheet icon and display data in a spreadsheet format, whereas graph reports have a bar graph icon and have been optimized by MSC admins to display as a visualization. Graph reports usually have a separate grid format available.
Navigating within a Report
Return to Shared Reports.
Open the Holds folder. Hover over the report titled MSC Top Juvenile Holds.
Hovering over a report causes quick links to appear; these links allow you to do things with the report without running it first in BCA.
Clicking Subscriptions takes you to any Personal Views you’ve saved for that report.
Clicking Send Now prompts you to enter an email address or choose from the list you created in your Preferences before emailing the results to someone.
Clicking Export opens the results in Excel or Word. You’ll be prompted to choose a format for the exported results first.
Clicking PDF downloads a PDF of the results.
To learn more about saving personal views and sharing and exporting reports, see BCA - Saving Reports and BCA - Sharing Reports.
Click anywhere else on the report or report icon to run the report in BCA. You will still have the option to create a personal view, as well as send, export or download the report after running it. This report won’t prompt you for further information, such as your library.
To learn more about prompted reports, see Single-Prompt Reports and Page-By Axis and Multi-Prompt Reports and Re-Prompting.
The report displays in the default grid format – like a spreadsheet – in the report window. Check in the upper left corner of this window to see how many pages make up the report.
The left sidebar (A) lists shortcuts to related reports that you can run with one click. You can resize the sidebar by hovering over it and dragging or remove it entirely by clicking the X in its upper right corner.
To restore the sidebar, select Related Reports from the Tools drop-down.
The black bar at the top of the page contains the headings Report Home, Tools, Data and Grid (B), which act like the tabs at the top of a Microsoft Word document.
Clicking a tab changes the options available in the dark grey bar below the tabs. You can hover over the icons to learn what they do. Those same options are listed in the tab drop-downs, so you can use the icons, drop-downs or both when working in a report – whichever method works best for you.
Report Home deals with creating a personal view, sharing the report, exporting it, printing it and so on.
Tools allows you to view and hide different aspects of the report interface, such as removing and restoring the Related Reports sidebar as we saw earlier.
To unlock the right-hand scroll bar, go into Report Options and unselect the 'lock' box under columns. Please note that this will not permanently change the report options. You will have to do this every time.
Going into Data is one way you can sort and refine report results.
MSC admins recommend exporting your data to Excel if you need to do things like delete or rearrange columns.
Grid is where you can manipulate how your results display in BCA. Two things you may want to adjust in Grid are the report style and autofit options.
Finance (C) is the default report style. To browse other styles, click the drop-down arrow next to Finance and scroll through the options.
To expand your results in the report window, click the Autofit to Contents (D) or Autofit to Window (E) icon.
The report view icons (F) always appear on the far left of the dark grey bar, regardless of which tab is selected. You can view results as a grid, which is the default, as a graph, or both.
Not all report data displays well in graph form, which is why MSC admins created optimized graph reports. Please open a help desk ticket if you don’t see the graph report you’re looking for.
To sort data without using the Data icons or drop-down, right-click on any column header and select Sort or Sort Grid.
Choosing Sort will allow you to sort your results based on the data in the column you clicked. If you’d rather view holds by title, for example, you can right-click Catalog Title, click Sort, then choose Ascending or Descending.
Right-clicking any header and selecting Sort Grid will open an Advanced Sort window. Here you can sort by multiple columns or rows.
To undo any changes you make to your report, use the forward and back arrows within the report itself, not the arrows you use to navigate between folders.
Video Tutorial
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