Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 1: Introduction Transcript

Hi. My name is Alison. I’m with CaseWare Analytics and today I’m here to give an overview of CaseWare IDEA. CaseWare IDEA is an easy to use data analysis tool that will help you gain insight and gather information from your data.

To begin with, I’ll start by going over some of the user interface elements and explain what each one does. The File Explorer shows a list of all the files in your current project. It also shows you the number of records in each database, the size of the file, the modified date and creation date as well as any parent-child relationships which may exist between databases.

To open a database, simply double click it. This opens the file in the database window. If you select a cell and try to type you will see that you cannot change the data. This ensures data integrity and helps reduce the risk of accidentally changing or deleting data.

The options in the Properties window are used to change what information shows in the database window or to display information about the contents of the active database. Data is selected by default when a file is opened, and shows the actual data in the active file.

History is used to display a list of all tasks run against a file. Field Statistics will show details about the data such as the earliest date, largest value, the number of records and so on. The kind of information displayed in the Field Statistics will depend on the data type.

Numeric data has different properties than Date data. Both of these are different than time data and so the contents for each type are slightly different. The Control Total is used to keep a total of any numeric field visible on the screen.

Criteria is used to open the Equation Editor, a tool to help you build equations. We’ll talk more about this later.

Other items in the Properties pane include Results, Indices and Comments. These items will be also discussed later in the tutorial.

At the bottom of the file explorer window there is the library tab, which shows you other project related files At the very bottom of the IDEA window, there are two fly out windows which come up when either performing a search, or running a task.

All tasks in IDEA are accessed through the IDEA Ribbon at the top of the screen. The tasks are grouped onto six different tabs for different types of activities.