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Aspen - Did You Know..."Quick Chart Menu"

Aspen - Did You Know About the "Quick Chart Menu" Option?

I thought I would use this space to provide additional information about some of the cool, less well known features of Aspen, our SIS, from Follett School Solutions. One of the hidden gems that I use all of the time, but few people use is the "Quick Chart Menu" tool. This tool allows you to take a quick look at the data in a visual manner. It amazes me that I get the same response whenever I'm sitting down with our teachers and administrators and I click on the Quick Chart menu. Whenever a beautiful bar chart, line chart or pie chart appears I get the following reaction. First they respond with, "Wait, what did you just do?" Inevitably their incredulity is followed by, "How did you get that?" Once I show them how simple it is to find and use the tool they all respond sheepishly that they can't believe such a powerful little tool was always sitting right under the nose.

Users can find the Quick Chart Menu tool whenever the access any of the data tables in Aspen. Once you click on a table heading (commonly known as a top tab in "Aspenspeak") several options become available, and the quick chart menu is bundled with a group of tools. It is located in the far, right-hand corner of your browser window, and is depicted in the screen capture below.

Quick Chart menu located in Aspen.


Teachers and administrators can access the tool from any of the data tables found in their staff view, school view or district view. It also allows users to quickly analyze the data within a given table with a nice visual representation without spending a lot of time and effort on the process. When teachers and administrators use the power of field sets, queries and the quick chart menu tool that's when the magic happens!

How Do You Do It?

It's really easy to create a quick chart is Aspen. Do the following:
  1. In Aspen, locate the table you want to dig deeper into,  and click on the top tab or the table name. For the purposes of this demonstration I want to look at the lunch status (paid, free, or reduced) for all of our active students.
  2. Click on the quick chart menu tool and choose from the three chart types available. I would like to see this data represented in a pie chart, so I will choose the pie chart option. 
  3. Once you've selected your chat type you will need to select the data that you want to analyze. This information is found in a field within the data table that you selected. Simply click on the picklist icon to choose the appropriate field. In this demonstration I am selecting the lunch description field. You will also want to select an appropriate title for your chart. Once you've make all of the appropriate choices simply click the OK button. 
  4. Once you click the OK button, your chart will appear in a pop-up window. Make sure you have allowed pop-ups in your browser settings. Click on the help tool if you need to adjust your browser settings.
    Pie Chart and Table


    I am positive that once you learn how to use this simple, but powerful tool in Aspen you will find countless ways to use it to help analyze the data concerning your students. When you couple this tool with the ability to query the various data sets in Aspen you have a very powerful tool at your disposal. Use the comment tool in Blogger to let me know if you have any questions or requests about what I should write about in my next installation of "Aspen- Did You Know..."
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