Analytics & Report Basics - Analytics Overview Module

Owned by Jennifer Koerber (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jan 10, 2019

This is the first section of the Analytics module to the Alma Overviews course. The video is at the top of the page, followed by the script.

In this video, you'll review:

Introduction

Welcome to the Analytics module of the Alma Overview online course. In this module we will focus on how to find available reports, how to run reports, and how to export report results to your desktop. We will also open Alma Analytics to introduce you to that interface, and show you where to find additional reports available to Analytics users at Harvard.

A note: Analytics is only available in the Production version of Alma because it deals with current data, so these videos will take place in the Production environment.

What is Analytics?

Alma Analytics is an open, collaborative environment with reports available to run as needed, subscription reports (to receive output via email on a regular schedule), and the ability to create analyses. Whether you only wish to view and run established reports, or want to create your own analyses, this video sequence will provide an overview and can be followed by training on creating analyses.

Alma Analytics Menu

Let’s start by looking at the Analytics menu. Under this menu, you can:

  • Access Design Analytics to create analyses
  • Subscribe to Analytics that have been made available for subscription
  • Run any of the reports listed under the Reports menu as needed

We’ll start with reports that can be run directly from this menu.

Reports Menu

The reports in this list were created by the Analytics and Reporting Working Group based on established reporting needs. There are currently 18 reports on the list – you can scroll down to see all of them. Staff with the Design Analytics role and permissions can view the complete list of available reports; other staff will see the reports for which they have permissions.

Reports on this list follow a naming convention to help create a legible display and keep related reports together. The name starts with an abbreviation for the functional area for which the analysis was created in all caps and followed by a title.

You can see that we have several acquisitions reports, reports for eResources, finance, fulfillment and resource management. If I hover over the title of a report, a pop-up will display with a description of that report, the author, and the date it was created.

These reports are designed for general use and include prompts to allow filtering output for a specific library, unit, or workflow.

Running Reports

Let’s look at a financial report to walk through running a report. We’ll look at the FIN-Fund Ledger Flexible input report.

  1. First, click on the title of the report.
  2. The prompt page will open in a new tab or window (according to your browser preferences) to let you filter the output.
  3. Some prompts are required, others are optional.
  4. In this report, the default value is set to the current BUDGET YEAR and can’t be changed.
  5. You could run this report for all 2019 budgets, but it’s more likely that you are only interested in a certain TUB or combination of TUB and ORG code, such as all budgets used by the Law School.
    1. To limit my report, I find the prompt for TUB, select the down arrow to view all of the codes and scroll until I find 265 for the law school. I can also put my cursor in the field and type in ‘265’. You can do the same for ORG, FUND, and other parts of the budget string.
  6. Once you finish choosing from the prompts, click OK and wait for the results to appear in that same tab.

In the results you can see that there is a header section with:

  • The report title,
  • The date and time when the report ran,
  • The filters that were used, and
  • The number of rows retrieved.

Total amounts are calculated at the bottom of the report.

Exporting results from Analytics via Alma

After you run a report, you can scroll to the bottom of the page and see three options: Print, Export, Refresh.

Print will open up a dialog box that will allow you to print the report without exporting/saving it first, either as a PDF or printable HTML file.

Export will allow you to export and save the report in the following format options:

  • PDF
  • Excel 2007+
  • Powerpoint 2007+
  • Web Archive (.mht)
  • Data
    • CSV
    • Tab delimited format
    • XML

There are limits to how many rows can be exported:

  • To Excel, 65,000 rows
  • To CSV, 500,000 rows.

Refresh will refresh the results of this report on-demand, but is less useful in our environment because our Analytics data is a daily snapshot of Alma, taken automatically every 24 hours.

If we go back into Alma, at the bottom of the Analytics dropdown menu, you can view the status of the Alma data:

  • Data updated as of shows when data was last pulled from Alma
  • Data available as of is the time at which that data was made available in Analytics

Subscribing to Reports

Finally, from the Analytics menu, you can subscribe to reports and receive an automated email with the results. To subscribe to a scheduled report:

  1. Click on the Analytics menu
  2. Click on Subscribe to Analytics and look at the reports that are available
  3. Activate the subscription by clicking the slider in the Subscribe column
  4. That’s it!

There are only a couple of reports right now, but you can request that a report be added to this list of scheduled reports by submitting a ticket to the LTS Alma Support Center.

In this video, we’ve reviewed the basics of running reports in Alma. Next, let’s look more closely at different ways to interact with prompts for even more customized results.

Â