Morningstar Direct is organized into four main areas: Home, Fund Analysis, Equity Analysis, and Workspace.

A. Home is your "mini-portal" to links to look up data, create new reports, open recently saved files, view market performance, view alerts and more.

B. Fund Analysis and Equity Anslysis are research areas where you have access to Morningstar Direct's vast data.

C. Workspace area allows you to generate PDF reports, charts and to define the data and variables that you will use frequently in your analysis.

Search criteria are similar to investment lists. They differ in that the membership of the investments within search criteria is dynamic; users save the search criteria instead of actual the investment members. The members change based on which investments fit the criteria at the time the search is executed. The data points associated with search criteria results are also defined in one of two ways: using system data lists, or using a data point list created by the user.

The investment lists serve performance reporting, peer analysis, and other important tasks of investment research. Users define the membership of the investment list in one of four ways: individually, by search criteria, accessing a pre-created investment list, or by importing a list. The data points associated with an investment list are also defined in one of two ways: using system data lists, or using a data point list created by the user.

Pre-defined reports add clarity and understanding to your research and communications. Current PDF reports include Returns-Based Style Analysis, Holdings-Based Style Consistency, Investment Summary, Performance Evaluation, Investment Comparison, Holdings Comparison, Rating Analysis, and Hedge Fund Summary.

Charts enable users to generate powerful visual presentation of in-depth analysis that can be exported into PowerPoint (PPT), Clipboard, or PDF. Current charts include: Floating Bar, Holdings-Based Style Map, Holdings-Based Style Trail, Returns-Based Style Trail, Time Series, and Scatter Plot.

A data set allows you to streamline your research by assembling and saving frequently used data points. You can use data sets to generate tables and charts.

Create your own aggregates (blended benchmarks and portfolios of investments) and imported investments.

Each tab within Workspace has a list of files you have created. To open a file, double click the file's name.

When you log in, you begin in the Home area. To go to a different area, use the left navigation.