Handshake's reporting tool, Insights, is powered by Omni. Before you start building or exploring reports, it helps to know the core terms Omni uses, as they show up throughout the interface and in Handshake's help articles and Academy courses.
Note: You'll need both Analytics: Access and Analytics: Manage permissions to view and/or build reports. If you don't have these permissions, reach out to your institution's Handshake administrator.
The building blocks of a report
Workbook: A workbook is the container for your report. Think of it as the whole document. A single workbook can hold multiple sheets (tiles), so related visualizations and tables can live together in one place.
Sheet / Tile: A sheet (sometimes called a tile) is one page or visualization within a workbook. A workbook can contain several tiles. For example, one tile with a data table and another with a chart built from the same query.
Topic: Topics are curated, pre-organized sets of data in Omni. Each topic groups together the fields (dimensions and measures) that are relevant to a particular subject area, so you're only working with data that's related to what you're trying to report on.
Explore: An explore is where you build and interact with a query — adding fields, applying filters, and shaping your results. Opening an existing report and selecting Explore creates a duplicate you can modify without affecting the original.
Query: A query is the actual request for data. The combination of dimensions, measures, and filters you've selected. Running a query returns your results.
Fields: dimensions and measures
Dimension: A dimension answers the question "What data do I want?" Dimensions are the descriptive columns in your table — things like student major, employer name, or event date. They're the attributes you use to group and segment your data.
Measure: A measure answers the question "What do I want to do with my data?" Measures are the math performed on top of your data — counts, sums, averages, and other calculations.
Custom fields: Custom fields let you create reusable dimensions and measures beyond what's built in, using modeled objects like bins, groups, or filtered measures.
Table calculations: Table calculations are Excel-style, post-query formulas — used for things like percent of total, running totals, or period-over-period comparisons. These are applied after your query has already returned results.
Shaping your results
Results: Results are the data your query returns after you run it, based on the dimensions, measures, and filters you've selected.
Filters: Filters answer the question "How do I get the right data?" They let you narrow your results down to the specific records you're interested in (for example, filtering to a specific graduation year or a location radius).
Pivots: Pivots let you reorganize your results by rotating a dimension into columns instead of rows. You can only pivot on a dimension if you also include a measure (such as a count) in your data.
Saving and sharing
My Documents: Saving a report to My Documents keeps it private to you and anyone specific you choose to share it with.
The Hub: Saving a report to the Hub shares it with everyone at your institution who has access to Omni Insights.
Spreadsheet tabs: Spreadsheet tabs bring an Excel-like environment directly into your workbook, letting you connect familiar spreadsheet formulas to live query data — no exporting or manual refreshing required.
Good to Know
- Data refresh: Data in Insights refreshes at midnight.
- Caching: Omni caches result sets to speed up performance; cached results are shared across users based on their own data access permissions.
- Downloadable: Any results in Insights can be downloaded to Excel — if you can't accomplish something directly in Insights, you can always export and continue working in a spreadsheet.
- AI Assistant: Omni includes an AI Assistant for building reports using natural language prompts. It's a reporting tool only — it doesn't scrape the web and shouldn't be used for anything outside of your Handshake data. Being specific in your prompts (e.g., "show sign-ups by major for the past 90 days, grouped by week") gets you better results faster.