 Welcome to this guided tour of VIZ, an online tool to help you determine how broadly courses can apply across degree requirements at Ohio State. VIZ can be accessed at go.osu.edu-viz. The basic idea is simple. If a course can fulfill a requirement for a major, other than electives or open options, then the course is approved for that major, otherwise it isn't. VIZ is designed to help you visualize this information quickly and easily. The first thing you'll notice when you load VIZ is the prominent warning that this is not a general purpose degree planning tool. It's important to understand that just because a course can be approved for a given major under some circumstances doesn't mean that it will be for you. In general, you should always talk to an advisor before scheduling. Once that's clear, you can start using VIZ to track cross-program requirements. The page has a top menu bar, which you can hide if you want, a search pane, and a results pane. When you first load VIZ, the search pane is labeled courses and the results pane is labeled programs. This means that you'll be searching on courses and displaying programs that accept your selections. You'll see that these courses are broken into several broad categories to help you quickly find what you're looking for. To search by a course, you select it from the drop-down menu under its category label. For example, imagine you're considering taking Chemistry 11-10 next semester. You know that some majors don't accept this class, but you're not exactly sure which ones. VIZ can tell you instantly just select Chem 11-10 under the physical science category. You'll see that in the results pane, the majors that accept Chemistry 11-10 now have green check marks and those that don't have red Xs. You can also select courses from more than one category, in which case VIZ will highlight only the majors that can accept everything you've selected. Imagine you're debating taking Arabic in addition to Chem 11-10. Leaving Chem 11-10 selected, you can also select Arabic under the foreign language category. Now several more majors are x'd out, and only those that can use both courses are highlighted. You can clear your search by clicking Reset in the top menu bar. Searching by courses is the main reason most people use VIZ. However, VIZ does allow you to flip things around and search for accepted courses by program. To search by program, click the search by program button in the bottom of the search pane. You'll now see that academic programs appear in the search pane, and courses appear in the results pane. If you click on a program in the search pane, the results pane will highlight only those courses that the program can accept. If you just want an idea of the courses required for a single program, you're much better off using the degree audit system than VIZ, since the results will be more detailed and tailored to your individual academic record. But the search by program feature in VIZ becomes especially useful when you need to look at multiple programs at once. Imagine you're on the fence between African American and African Studies, Economics, and Fashion and Retail Studies, and you need to choose a social science class. Using the degree audit, you would need to run all three of these individually and look for overlapping requirements by hand. With VIZ, you can just select all three when searching by program, then look to see which social science courses are still highlighted. In this case, there is only one approved option for all three programs, Economics 2001. Now imagine you want to see how this would change if you eliminated the economics interest. To do this, you can either control click Economics in the search pane, or click the red X next to Economics in the list of selected programs. Now you can see that Consumer and Family Financial Services 2910 is back in the mix. If at any time you want to view courses that are approved for any of the selected programs instead of all of them, you can select any as the match type in the search pane. Now the results pane is displaying courses accepted either by African American and African Studies, or Fashion and Retail Studies, or both. VIZ remembers your selections when switching back and forth between search types, so if you return to the search by course, do some searching, and then later come back to search by program, your most recent search results are still there. As before, clicking Reset takes you back to the default settings. You may be interested only in the majors in a specific set of colleges rather than every program at the university. If so, you can collapse groups you aren't interested in by clicking on the header for that group. Imagine you know you do not want an Arts and Sciences major. If so, clicking on Arts and Sciences will hide the group and simplify your search results. Headers for expanded groups have a minus sign next to them, and headers for collapsed groups have a plus sign. You can collapse or expand all groups by clicking on the main header of the results pane. This can help you hone in on a particular group, collapse everything, and then expand the group you're interested in. Sometimes it can be helpful to see an ungrouped alphabetical list in the results pane. This is especially true if you don't know or care which group the thing you're searching for belongs to. In this case, since we're searching programs by course, we can accomplish this by clicking Hide Colleges in the top menu bar. You'll see that the group labels for colleges disappear, and the programs are re-alphabetized. To reveal groups again, simply click the same button. These grouping features are also available under both search by course and search by program. Now you're ready to start using Viz to make smarter scheduling decisions in light of cross-program requirements at Ohio State. If you have questions or feedback about this tool, email us by clicking on the Feedback button in the bottom right corner of the page.