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Portal Help
Generating Reports
Market Reports can be generated through the portal by all users, whether registered or unregistered. To save your reports so that you can run them at a later date you must be a registered user. Reports always appear in pagination form. Values that are not present for whatever reason (example: not available, insufficient volume or number of sales to report) are either blank or marked "not available" or "not specified." Where appropriate, Market News Reporter comments are included with the reports.
The following reports are available:
Generating Custom Reports
If you are looking for historical information and for data covering a range of dates, consider using the portal's custom report generation functionality. This feature was designed to allow you to develop and execute specific queries, such as a search on one commodity or one location. You can also search on simple average and weighted averge report types for Grain and Cattle categories.
You can now run reports that until recently only USDA personnel and the Customer Service Center could run by special request.
Weekly reports consider the week to start on Sunday and end on Saturday, so the user must chose a week ending Saturday date. Monthly reports are based on the first calendar day of the month to the last calendar day of the month. Annual reports are based on the first calendar day of the year to the last calendar day of the year.
Graphs
Graphs are available for weekly, monthly, and annual frequency price data by clicking the graph icon on the custom report results page. Both guest and registered users can create graphs. Graphs on the portal are line charts with the option of comparing report data to the previous year. A graph will only generate if the parameters selected on the graph selection page match the report exactly. Also, no graph line will show for the previous year comparison if the exact same data could not be found for the previous year.
As a registered user, the portlet provides a place for the user to save their favorite graphs to their homepage. To bookmark a graph to the My Custom Reports portlet, navigate to the desired graph and click the "Save to My Favorites" link located above the displayed graph. Shortcuts to graphs can be deleted by clicking the edit button in the My Favorites portlet and removing them in the subsequent page.
Users can also download, save, and view an image of a graph by clicking the "Download Graph" link. If a user chooses to save a graph, the graph can be viewed outside the browser. Saved graphs can be inserted into a document or shared in an email.