Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Save Time! Running Reports in the Background

Many of you have been looking at 2010 preliminary ELA reports in the data warehouse since earlier this summer, and may also have accessed the preliminary roster reports for all subjects from your Security Portal drop boxes.

The Data Warehouse welcome screen informs us that the reports for Math and Science are available as of today. But you're not the only one who's excited and ready to jump in and run reports! Obviously this is a very busy time for Data Warehouse use across the state. Even though upgrades have been made to the Data Warehouse servers over the last year, you may still encounter delays in performance while waiting for reports to run.

The solution? Learn to run reports "in the background" (also sometimes called "batch mode.") In this way, you set your reports up to run, but don't have to watch the hourglass spin on your screen while they do so. Reports are delivered to your My Folders or District Folders area in the desired format (PDF, Excel, or HTML.) This simple instruction sheet (Running Data Warehouse Reports in the Background) will walk you through the process.