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Advanced Viewer Online Walkthrough

Advanced Search Viewer is Oracle’s ad hoc querying viewer. It is accessible to most people with IDEAS access and can be used to view reports that are customized for one’s particular college or unit.

To begin, we must first login to ideas at http://ideas.wvu.edu After you have logged in, you will see the following screen, click on IDEAS Report Viewer to continue.
IDEAS Report Viewer 1

After we have clicked on advanced search viewer, we will be taken to the Discoverer Plus Viewer entry page. On this page, we have the option to either make a more permanent connection or log into the system directly. To create a connection, click on the Create Connection Icon on the right hand side of the screen and follow the instructions that were given in class. To enter the system directly, you should type your user name and password in the boxes labeled as such and in the text box labeled Database you should type ideaprod Press Enter or click on the box labeled Go.
Connect Directly image

You will be presented with a list of reports that are available for you to run. Next to each report name is a blue arrow with a plus sign, click on the arrow next to the report you would like to see and a list of worksheets within the report will appear. (As a side-note, in the old version, reports had a persons name in front of them; e.g. RDEAN.Coll_enrollment or LDELEURERE.Students Enrolled. The new version eliminates the name prefix and will now be called simply Coll_enrollment or Students Enrolled. If you have difficulty finding a report you used to use, feel free to call 293.4245 and we will attempt to help you locate it.) A worksheet in Viewer is very similar to a sheet in Excel, they each contain different data somehow related to the report as a whole. We can click on the name of the worksheet to run it. For this example, we will click next to UNIV_Grades of Students and choose the sheet labeled End of Term Grades by Course.
IDEAS Report Viewer 3

We will now be presented with our parameters screen if it has any. On this screen, we can customize the report to return the data specific to our request. We will be presented with a list of parameters that we can change. If there is a flashlight next to the parameter box, we can click on it to be presented with a list of values from which we can choose. After we have chosen our parameters, we can click on the go button at the bottom of the screen. Very frequently, we will see a Registration Term or Student File Name parameter. This parameter chooses the time for which the report is run. It is of the form ‘YYYYTT-MMDDYY-CensusEnd’ YYYY is the year of the term you are running, in this case 2005. TT is the first month of the term 08 would be Fall semester, 01 would be spring semester 05 and 07 are Summer 1 and Summer 2 respectively. The next six digits are the date on which the file was put into the system. In this example, January 2 of 2006. The last part of the term tells whether it is a CensusEnd, CensusBegin or Current File; CensusEnd is the final HEPC cut for the semester, it contains the grades of students and semester GPAs, CensusBegin is the beginning of term HEPC cut, Current is a weekly cut of the census file that gives recent information, but is not HEPC verifiable. For this example, we will accept the default.
Parameters Needed

After a few minutes, your report will appear on the screen. At the top of the screen, there will usually be a title that explains a little bit about the report (circled in green), below that are the parameters you chose. You can change them as you did on the earlier screen and press go to rerun your report with new parameters. Below that are the page items (circled in Yellow) These allow you to limit the data you pulled to specific things without running the entire report again. In this case, our report is only pulling Pre-Forensic majors, we can pull down the column and instead choose to look at Pre-Biology majors. Notice that the only majors available are UGASC majors, to see other colleges, we must change the Student College field to the Colleges majors we wish to see. If we wish to see all majors within a college, we select <All>. Below the page items is the actual data in the report. If we wish to export it to Excel, we can click on the Export button on the left hand side of the screen and follow the instructions(circled in Red) If we wish to run another report, we can click on the link that says Workbooks at the top of the screen (Circled in Blue).
Report Results

Congratulations! You have just run your first report in the new Advanced Search Viewer. If you have any questions, please call the Division of Planning at 293.4245 or email us at planning@mail.wvu.edu

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