Selecting Variables

The Select Data Elements screen allows you to quickly locate the data elements of interest.

There are three main sections to this screen: Available data elements, selected data elements, and years.. (see example)

Available data elements

The data elements available to you are organized in folders in a tree control. By clicking on the plus sign you can expand a folder and view the data elements in that folder.

To select a data element, simply click the check box between the data element’s icon and its name. You will see that data element appear in the Selected Data Elements box on the top right.

To remove a data element, simply uncheck the box and it will be removed from the Selected Data Elements box.

The icons next to the data elements simply indicate what kind of data element it is. The icon of two people indicates a statistical date element, while the icon of two people in a box indicates a categorical data element.

The Selected Data Elements box shows the list of data elements you have selected.

When selecting data elements, you should be judicious about selecting the same kind of elements. For example, if you selected Total Expenditures and Total Expenditures per Capita, these two data elements will not display well together on a chart. Total Expenditures will return values in the hundreds of thousands or millions, while Expenditures per Capita will return values less than 20 in many cases. On the graph, it will appear as if there are no values for Total Expenditures per Capita.

The years box shows a list of all of the years of data that are available for the particular data set you are using. You can select multiple years of data to show trending on any data element.

There is one limitation on trending. Connect gives you the ability to show multiple libraries, multiple data elements, and multiple years. However, you can only choose any two of these at a time. That means that if you want to show multiple libraries and multiple data elements, you can only choose one year. If you want to show multiple data elements and multiple years, you can only choose one library.

Also note that the list of available data elements only reflects the data elements available in the most recent year of data for the data set. Elements that used to be collected are not available; elements that used to be combined but are now separate will show up as blanks in prior years.

The next button will take you to the format page to determine how you want to display your results.