The Event Distribution report presents the snapshot's events in a bar chart that can be grouped, sorted, and shaded in a variety of meaningful ways without considering room placement.
This report may be a logical place to start to get the big picture of demand, including room capacity requirements, organization sponsorship, and recurrence patterns.
Questions that the Event Distribution report can help answer include:
- Are there trends in the sizes of your classes?
- What do enrollment sizes reveal about your current space needs?
- Which departments/organizations sponsor the highest percentages of classes?
- For your largest organizations, which class size puts the greatest demand on rooms?
- Does distribution of classes vary significantly by day or time of day?
- How well are organizations complying with standard meeting patterns?
Image: Event Distribution Report
Report Settings
The values displayed in the bar chart are influenced by several settings:
- Size By sets what the size of each bar on the chart measures. The chart's axis automatically scales appropriately.
- Meetings: The number of individual occurrences
- Meeting Hours: The sum of all occurrence durations
- Headcount: The total headcount of all events
- Contact Hours: Headcount multiplied by Meeting Hours
- Events: The total number of events
- Group By determines what group of events each bar of the chart represents.
- Organization: The primary organization on the event
- College: The college that the event belongs to
- Headcount: The headcount for the event (either registered or expected, based on filter options)
- Duration: The length (in minutes) of the event
- Day Combination: The weekdays when the event has occurrences (M=Monday, T=Tuesday, W=Wednesday, R=Thursday, F=Friday, S=Saturday, U=Sunday)
- Start Time and End Time: The event's start or time
- Meeting Time: The event's meeting time
- Breakpoints: Determined by predefined breakpoint lists.
- Orientation arranges the bars from top to bottom or left to right.
- Sort By orders the bars are according to the names of each group or their total size.
- Limit determines how many groups of events appear as bars in the report, from just the five with the highest values to the full set. Selecting Show Residual combines the remaining groups into a single bar.
Colors and Shading
The report's colors are controlled by several options visible by clicking on the "more" link to the right. The events which make up a particular group can be colored based on their meeting patterns.
There are two options for coloring meeting patterns:
- Shading by Standard Schedule divides the bars into red and green portions based on whether an event's meeting pattern is found in the selected standard schedule.
- Shading by Time of Day shades red and green portions into lighter and darker versions based on whether a meeting pattern starts in the morning, afternoon, or evening. (Morning is anything before 12pm and evening is anything after 6pm.)
Reading the Report
Report data is displayed in bar chart format:
- One axis shows the total demand. This can measure several different values such as the total number of events or total durations of all occurrences.
- The other axis shows the events in the snapshot. They can be grouped in several different ways, described above.
- The color of each bar is determined by the shading options described above. A single bar may contain events with many different start times or meeting patterns, so each bar is likely to be shaded with multiple colors.
Assessing the Report Results
- What's the report showing you about classes?
- Does your class distribution match your expectations?
- Are most of your classes compliant with your schedule standards/goals?