DataVot Help

Quick Start

The normal workflow is: load data, build a pivot table, save it as a report, and reopen it later. A pivot table is simply a way to summarize your data — for example, counting how many students reached each performance level, broken down by school.

Main Pages

Each main toolbar button has its own page. Data sources, reports, administration, and support tools are intentionally separated.

Test Data Sets

A Test Data Set is the official data for one school district and one test administration. It is identified by test name, year, and season.

Compare across years

When you have the same test for more than one year or season, you can combine those data sets into one source and build a single report across them — without copying any data. You don't set this up as a separate thing: DataVot offers it to you in context whenever your data makes it useful.

Reports

A report is a saved pivot table design: rows, columns, values, filters, formatting, display modes, chart settings, and the source it was built from.

Dashboard

The Dashboard turns your official test results into bar charts — no report building required. Pick a test from the dropdowns at the top and the chart redraws. It's available to school admins, teachers, and System Admins; teachers see only the schools they have access to.

Choosing what to show

The selectors at the top feed the chart. Test and Season are single choices; Years, Subject, Test code, and Schools are checkbox menus where you can pick several at once (leaving a menu on “All” means no filter). System Admins also pick a District first.

Two ways to read the scores

Chart options

The icon button in the chart's top-right corner opens chart settings, like a spreadsheet:

• Orientation — vertical or horizontal bars.
• Cluster by — place bars of the same subject, test code, or year next to each other. This only arranges the bars; it does not merge them (that's what Combined does).
• Sort — order the bars A–Z or by highest / lowest proficiency.
• Color by (in the Proficiency Rates view) — color the bars by subject, year, or school. Each value keeps the same color everywhere — for example ELA is always blue and Math always amber — so the chart is easy to read at a glance. A small color key appears below the chart.
• Data labels, Legend, and Gridlines toggles.

Building Reports

The editor panel contains the pivot zones and the field list. Drag fields into zones to build the table — here's the idea in motion:

Pivot Zones

Every report is built from four zones. Which zone a field goes in decides what question the table answers — the same three fields arranged differently give you three different reports.

The four zones

Choosing where a field goes

A useful rule: put the thing you want to compare across in Columns, and the thing you want to read down a list in Rows. Performance level in Columns and school in Rows gives you one row per school and one column per level, which is the shape most people are picturing when they ask for “the results by school”.

Aggregations and Display Modes

Every field in Values is calculated somehow. The default is Count, which answers “how many students?” — change it on the field itself when you want a different question answered.

How a value can be calculated

Showing values as percentages

Grand totals follow the display mode, so a table shown as percentages totals to 100% rather than to a count.

Filtering and Searching

Two different tools that are easy to confuse. A filter changes which source rows go into the report at all. Search changes only what you can see on screen right now. Neither touches the data set underneath, and clearing either brings everything back.

Filters

• Drop a field into the Filters zone and choose which values to include. The field does not appear in the table — it just narrows what feeds it.
• Filter on a field you are already showing. Putting SchoolName in both Rows and Filters is normal: show a row per school, but only the three you care about.
• Filters are saved with the report. Reopen it next year and the same filter is applied to the new file.

Search

Search narrows the visible rows of the table you are looking at, without changing the report. It is the faster tool when you are hunting for one row and do not want to alter anything — and because it changes nothing, you do not need to undo it.

Computed Fields

Sometimes the field you want to group by is not in the file. Computed fields make one inside DataVot — the uploaded data set is never modified, and the new field lives with the report you built it in.

Binned fields

Group a numeric column into ranges. A scale score is a different number for almost every student, so grouping by it directly gives you a row per student and tells you nothing; binned into bands, it becomes a distribution you can actually read.

Derived fields

Build a new number from columns you already have, plus constants — a difference between two scores, a ratio, a scaled figure. The result behaves like any other numeric field: you can put it in Values, aggregate it, format it and chart it.

Field type toggle

DataVot works out whether each column is a number or a category when the file is read. It is usually right, but a column of grade levels stored as 03, 04 can be read either way. Switch the type when the guess is unhelpful — a field read as text cannot be averaged, and one read as a number sorts numerically rather than by label.

Chart View

Switch a report from Table to Chart and the same result is drawn as a chart. Nothing is rebuilt — it is the table you already made, shown a different way, and you can switch back and forth freely.

What a chart needs

At least one field in Rows and one in Values. Each row group becomes a bar; each value or column becomes a series within it. If the chart looks empty, that is almost always what is missing.

Four chart types

Chart options → Chart type switches between them. A bar chart is the default and is the right answer most of the time.

• Bar — comparing sizes across groups. The only type that stacks, so the Bar style setting below appears for this one alone.
• Line — a value moving across an ordered row field, most often a year.
• Area — the same shape as a line with the space beneath it filled, which reads as a quantity rather than a rate.
• Scatter — one point per row, using your first two value fields as the horizontal and vertical axes. With only one value field it plots that field against itself and says so on screen, so add the second field you want to compare.

Three ways to stack the bars

Making it presentable

• Chart title and axis labels — write your own rather than living with the field names.
• Series colours — set per series, so Met and Exceeded can read as related.
• Value labels — print the number on each bar, which usually beats making the reader estimate against a gridline.
• Legend placement — move it, or turn it off when the labels already say everything.

Formatting

Formatting changes how numbers look, never what they are. Nothing here edits your data set, and clearing a format leaves the underlying figure exactly as it was.

Number format

Set how many decimal places to show, add a prefix or suffix(a $, a unit, a word), or display a value as a percentage. Rounding is display-only — a rounded 66.5% still exports and totals as 66.5.

Conditional formatting

Colour the cells that meet a rule, so the eye lands on them first. Available comparisons:

Totals and column widths

• Totals — turn the totals row and totals column on or off independently. With a percentage display mode, grand totals are shown as percentages too.
• Column width — drag the handle between headers. Double-click a handle to snap that column back to its original width.

See the Records Behind a Number

Any figure in a report is a count of real rows, and you can open them. Click a number and DataVot lists the records that make it up — so “why is this 34?” is a click rather than a question for whoever built the report.

What you can do with them

• Search and sort the records like any other table, to find the one row you are actually looking for.
• Export them to CSV or Word, or print them to PDF — the same buttons as a report.
• Close and carry on — opening records changes nothing about the report underneath.

Export

Export sends out what the table currently shows — your grouping, your filters, your totals. It is not a dump of the original file. Change the report and export again and you get the new shape.

Exporting the records behind a number

When you open the records behind a figure (see Behind a Number), that list has its own CSV and Word buttons, plus Print for a clean PDF. Those export the records themselves rather than the summary — useful when a colleague asks “which students are those?”

For the tables a board presentation needs, use the Board Report instead — it has its own Copy for PowerPoint button that pastes straight onto a slide.

Board Report

New Jersey asks districts to present assessment results to the board at a public meeting, and NJQSAC asks for student-group breakdowns on top of that. The Board Reportbuilds those tables from your own uploaded results, in the shape the state's own presentation template expects, so you paste rather than retype. Open it from the card at the top of Reports.

Setting it up

Choose the Test, Season, and two years — a Baseline year to compare against and the year you are presenting. Then pick the Grade for the school-by-school table, the School for the school-versus-district table, and the student Group for the last one. Change any picker and every table redraws.

The seven tables

1. Students tested — both years and the difference.
2. Percentages by performance level, by grade — the district across both years, with the change.
3. Change compared with the state — your percentage-point movement beside New Jersey's.
4. District compared with the state — level detail, split into lower, middle and upper bands.
5. Schools, one grade — every school in the district side by side.
6. One school compared with the district — the same level detail for the school you picked.
7. Student groups — the disaggregated table NJQSAC asks for.

Getting them into your deck

Every table has two buttons. Copy for PowerPoint puts the table on your clipboard in a form PowerPoint and Word paste as a real table, keeping the rows and columns — paste it straight onto a slide. Download CSV saves the same figures as a file for Excel or Sheets. The downloaded numbers are the numbers on screen; they are formatted once and shared by both.

Two things to plan around

If a table is empty, the usual reason is that your district has no uploaded data set matching the test, season and years you picked. Check Test Data Sets first.

User Management

Every DataVot account belongs to a person, identified by their email address. This section is the complete guide to how school accounts work: the roles, how teachers join, what each person can do, and how account limits and purchasing work.

Roles in a school

How teachers join

School access for teachers

Removing someone

Removing a teacher (or demoted co-admin) disconnects them from the school: they immediately lose the district's data sets, school reports, and dashboard, and their seat is freed. Their account itself is not deleted — they keep their login and any personal reports, reverting to a plain individual account. Any pending invitation for that address is cancelled at the same time, so an old link can't be used to rejoin.

Account limits & purchasing more

DataVot has one simple plan. Your district's subscription includes 30 user accounts in total — one of them the primary admin, leaving up to 29 for teachers. Admins and teachers each use one account; pending invitations hold an account until accepted or cancelled. The Users page always shows how many accounts are in use.

Need more? Additional accounts are added in blocks of 10, paid by purchase order — no credit card or online checkout. Current pricing is published at datavot.com/pricing. Send your PO to info@datavot.com (or use the Contact page) and we raise your district's account limit, usually the same day. The limit is enforced when invitations are sent and when they are accepted, so you can never be billed by surprise.

System Admin Pages

System Admin is the hub for system administrators. It links to focused pages so district accounts, test setup, system data, database review, and support work stay separate.

Image size for articles

Settings → System Admin has a Max image size (px) value that applies to images uploaded to articles and community content. It is measured on the image’s longest edge, so it caps both tall and wide pictures with one number.

• Bigger images are scaled down automatically when you add them, keeping their proportions. You do not need to resize anything before uploading.
• Smaller images are left exactly as they are. Nothing is stretched or re-saved, so a small logo keeps its original sharpness.
• Animated GIFs are never resized, because resizing one would keep only its first frame and stop the animation.
• The limit applies wherever an image enters an article — the insert button, replacing an image, the cover image, and pasting or dragging a picture straight onto the page.

The default of 1920 px suits full-width article images on a large screen. Raise it if a detailed diagram needs to stay legible when a reader zooms in; lower it to keep pages loading quickly on school devices. There is a separate 5 MB limit on the file itself, which applies no matter what this is set to.

Act As Support Access

Act As lets a System Admin open a short support session as a school admin or teacher after explicit consent.

Community

DataVot publishes Articles for New Jersey school staff, and runs a Forum where members can ask questions and compare notes. Both are linked from the footer. Anyone can read either without an account; posting, commenting, liking and reporting need you to be signed in.

Taking part

• Post to a category so others can find it, and reply with comments. Comments thread one level deep — a reply to a reply sits alongside it rather than nesting further.
• Mention someone with @ and they get an email. You can turn that off for yourself in the Profile popover (“Email me when I'm @mentioned”).
• Pick how you appear. Choose an emoji avatar and either your real name or a nickname. Your posts keep the name you had when you wrote them.
• Report anything that needs a look with the report action — it goes to a moderation queue, not to the author.

Moderation, and what happens to you

Community roles are separate from your DataVot role: being a School Admin does not make you a moderator. There are three.

A ban stops you writing, never reading. A banned member keeps full access to every article and every thread — they simply cannot post, comment or like. Nothing you have already read is taken away from you.

Every moderation action is written to the activity log with who did it, so a decision can always be traced rather than argued about.

Security and Data Access

DataVot separates system administration from school data access and records sensitive support actions.

Tips and Shortcuts

Small habits that make DataVot easier to use.

Good report design