What’s in a view? Well, if you’re front window overlooks the city dump, not much; but if you see the sun setting on the lake, you might have a million-dollar view that’s the envy of many, especially those living across from the dump!

Previously, in Information at a Glance, we wrote about dashboards in general. We mentioned that dashboards allow you to see lots of information without effort, but what do the dashboards show? The short answer: Views.

In techno-speak, Views are widgets, i.e., applications or components that enable users to perform functions or access services. In Meal Magic Insight, Views are ways to see your information in various forms, such as gauges, graphs, charts, tables, and reports.

Some Views give basic summary information while others allow deeper investigation. A View might start with district-wide totals but then let you drill down to specific details that contribute to the totals.

Views can answer lots of questions: What’s the current enrollment by grade, school, or ethnicity? What’s the percentage of students by meal benefits? How much money was added to accounts today? What are the top-ten selling items?

Views save you the time and hassle of searching for a report. Indeed, Views are specialized reports that remain at your fingertips, well, eye level, to keep you informed about everything contained in Meal Magic Insight. In some cases, you even can print a View or save it as a PDF. Some Views can be saved in Excel format, allowing you to create on-the-fly exports that can be used by other applications.

Search results throughout Meal Magic Insight are shown in customizable Views too. You can select various columns to display, their order, and how they are filtered when you perform searches. Then, as with other Views, you can save search results as PDFs or Excel spreadsheets, meaning you can export more information about more things than you could in the past.

Views will change for the better how you work. Sit back. Relax. Enjoy the view. Ah, isn’t that nice? Like a warm breeze on the beach.