Evisions Blog
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Best Practices for Building Tables (Simple, Pivot, and Otherwise)
You’re tasked with creating a report for a set of data. The goal is to create a report your audience can quickly and easily understand, so they can use it to make key business decisions. You look at the data and see that it contains rows and rows...
Visualizing Data in Higher Education: Must-Have, Nice-to-Have, Shouldn’t-Have
All departments within an institution of higher education have numerous sources and insane amounts of data. They utilize these sources and data to track and forecast institutional performance. The departments are responsible for planning,...
Best Practices for Banded Report Design
Over the years, Evisions has taken on numerous projects and tackled many support tickets centered on banded reports. From building custom reports to advising on complex procedures to reproducing outdated or multi-sourced reports, a lot of time has...
The Growth of Voice AI in Higher Education
The penetration of artificial intelligence (AI) into our daily lives over the last several years has been rather incredible. Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Waze, Google assistant, music recommendations – the list goes on. The ability to talk to devices –...
Getting Your Banner Black Belt (Lesson Three): Learn to Love SQL
Welcome to the third and final installment of our Getting Your Banner Black Belt series. In this post, we get into the fine details of querying with SQL. This, of course, is the heart of any Banner reporting you’re doing. (As a quick note, all the...
Getting Your Banner Black Belt (Lesson Two): Use Good Requirements Documents
Learning the ropes of Banner reporting can be a challenging process. There is so much data to work with, so many metrics to track, and so many purposes to be served. But even if mastering such a powerful tool can feel impossible at times, I can...
Getting Your Banner Black Belt (Lesson One): Refuse to Become Overwhelmed
Mastering the art of Banner reporting can be easier than you might think! While Banner is a very complex Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, the first step in understanding its inner workings is to refuse to become overwhelmed by the...
Best Practices for Designing OLAP Cubes
For making complex data-driven decisions, you need a complex data visualization tool. Happily, OLAP (short for On-Line Analytical Processing) is fast becoming a ubiquitous method for the advanced analysis of multi-dimensional information. In Argos,...
A Complete Guide to Understanding IPEDS Reporting
Even as you read this, your institution of higher education is likely in the midst of some element of the IPEDS reporting cycle. With three reporting periods and a growing list of surveys, IPEDS seems to be endless. You know the surveys are...
Addressing Advancement in the Higher Education Industry
People often confuse development, or fundraising, with advancement in the higher education industry. While the actions have many similarities, they are different. Advancement refers to making progress in various avenues related to a university's...
Writing Reports with a Scheduling Mindset
There is an ever-growing need for reports to analyze the mass of data gathered by institutions. Resources to create and execute these reports are limited. An option to reduce the manual component of processing and sending these reports is to use a...
Taking the Enterprise Reporting Philosophy to Higher Education
I think you’ll agree that it’s an understatement to say we have seen considerable technological changes over the last 30 years. The internet, the rise of innovative technology, and the emergence of enterprise reporting systems have swept across the...
How Business Intelligence is Solving Some of the Peskiest Higher Ed Problems
Universities, large and small, private and public, are complex enterprises with issues unique to the education sector. While business intelligence (BI) is a well known option in business, there are specific challenges BI must address to gain deeper...
Five of the Top Metrics Used in Financial Aid
It doesn't matter if it’s a large state university, local community college, or smaller private institution. One of the things all higher education organizations have in common is that they’re all focused on making sure each and every student is...
Addressing the Need of Business Intelligence in Higher Education
Many people are aware of business intelligence (BI) products and how companies can use them to improve productivity to better understand the data behind their operations. However, not everyone realizes the powerful case for using business...