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Rio Olympics – Medals Treemaps

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Well, the Rio 2016 games have finished and we now all need to find something else to watch on TV. As always at the Olympics there was plenty to entertain and inspire. After the London games in 2012 we blogged showing the medal distribution using Treemaps. We’ve updated that for 2016 below with the corresponding 2012 equivalent:

CBS16

CBS12

The charts are split by country, and then sport where the size of the tile represents total number of medals, and the colour saturation represents the number of Gold medals. We can see immediately that the US retains a significant lead over the other nations, and also that roughly half its medals overall were won in Swimming and Athletics. Great Britain and France have seen their relative medal positions strengthen in the four years. It’s difficult to see the breakdown for countries with smaller numbers of medals, but the interactive version can of course be drilled to additional detail and we’ll make that available in the coming weeks.

Looking at things split by Sport then by country it’s as below:

SBC16

SBC12

Athletics and swimming have the most events and hence the most medals and largest presence on the Treemap. USA dominates both categories across both London and Rio, with an even stronger grip on athletics in Rio. Elsewhere China rule the diving boards, winning 7 of  the 8 events in Rio.

Team GB again did spectacularly well in Rio, and as a British company we can allow ourselves a slight bias in our coverage (a roundabout way of saying the remaining charts are just about the British team). Firstly we’ve brought the 2012 and 2016 data for GB together into one treemap as shown below.

GBNI_1612

While the mix of sports is slightly different, and in both games the team won medals across 19 sports, the core strengths remain fairly consistent. Despite that, there are some interesting movements. Gymnastics and swimming have shown the biggest improvements between 2012 and 2016. Cycling (all cycling disciplines grouped) had the same number of medals in total, but 2 fewer gold. Having said that when you start from such a high base even being close is success – when other teams are videoing your warm up / stay warm routines it’s safe to assume you’re doing something right!

Last but not least, a column chart showing overall GB medals by discipline across the two games – if you need a binary sport by sport comparison rather than contribution to total the classics still tell it best.

GB_c_1612

 

 

 

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Dynamic Tooltips / Mouseover

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Tooltips can be a useful addition to reporting, often used to display additional context or information which you don’t want to have permanently visible in the main body of the report. When the user sees a value of interest they simply hover over the cell and a popup displays the additional detail. The additional information can be anything required, as long as it can be retrieved from an Excel cell (or direct from the cube). Examples could include some textual information or sales for the same period last year.

Implementing this in XLCubed reports is straightforward, albeit not immediately obvious. Tooltips are implemented using the XL3Link() formula, most commonly used for in-context navigation within a report, where the focus is moved from one sheet to another while passing a parameter. A special parameter, introduced in version 8.1, extends XL3Link() for tooltips as explained below.

The syntax for XL3Link is:

XL3Link( [LinkLocation], [FriendlyName], [LinkType], [Range1], [Value1],…, [Range13], [Value13] )

LinkLocation: where the focus would normally jump to on clicking the cell. This can be left blank if you just want a tooltip.

Friendlyname: what is displayed in the cell. This could be static text (“i”) or an Excel formula referencing other cells in the workbook as needed.

LinkType: can be left blank for Tooltips.

To specify a tooltip, set Range1 to the value “XL3Tooltip”, and Value1 to be the content you want displayed in the tooltip. Value1 can be static text or can reference other cells as required, which means you can display other values which are also dynamically retrieved from the cube based on slicer selections etc. If the report is variable in length, the formula can be added into an XLCubed grid calculation and the Value1 parameter could use a vlookup to ensure a match on the appropriate data element.

The simple example below shows the basic approach, and the result also works when published to XLCubed Web.

 

s1

The extended example below shows combining several additional data fields. The line breaks are achieved using Alt + Enter.

s2

Thanks to our colleague Norbert Engelhardt at pmOne who blogged on this point recently in German and prompted this piece, basically an English version of the original:

XLCubed Insights #4 – Mouseover Funktion in XLCubed Berichten

 

 

Blog, Charts, Dashboard, Excel Tricks, Reporting, Visualization

How to gauge data through charts – Creating Gauge Charts

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A common question that comes up in support for XL Cubed is how to add charts that look like a dial, or a gauge. Something like the below:

1

 

 

 

 

 

 

These are actually very easy to make and publish to the web, plus they have the further bonus of adding something different to make your reports look more professional.

Once you have your data ready, add a new doughnut chart and configure it to show the information you want it to.

2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This will give you a simple doughnut chart.

 

3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next up, pick the cell that contains the information you want to show in the middle of the doughnut chart and reference it in another cell. For example, in the below example we have the two numbers that make up our doughnut chart in cells B3 and B4. Cell E3 contains the information we want to show in the middle of the doughnut chart.

4

 

 

 

 

As you can see, the formatting is different in E3 to the other cells. This is because we have formatted the cell to show the data how we want it to appear in the chart.

Once we are at this stage, it is just a case of transferring the number to the middle of the doughnut chart. You can do this by selecting the formatted cell, in our case E3, copying it and then paste special as a ‘Linked Picture’ anywhere in the worksheet (we will move it into the chart in the next step).

5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ‘Linked Picture’ appears as a cell but it actually acts like a picture so, lastly, move the picture into the middle of the doughnut chart so it looks how you want it, then, right click on the new picture and select ‘Send to Back’

 

6

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the cell is a ‘Linked Picture’ Any changes you make to the cell you copied, formatting or data, will update the image.

7

 

8

 

Your Gauge Chart is complete! These charts also look good when published to the web.

 

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Calculated fields are not available in an OLAP-based Pivot Table …

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One of users biggest frustrations with cube connected PivotTables is that they can’t add calculated fields like they can with a regular PivotTable – the option is greyed out on the ribbon. Data in the Pivot Table can be referenced elsewhere in Excel, but that makes the final report largely static in shape. It means users can’t add even the simplest of calculations into a report where the number of rows or columns may vary, and can lead to BI developers being asked to add every calculation imaginable into Analysis Services.

The good news is that XLCubed Grids (described by some as PivotTables on steroids) let users add any Excel formula directly into the grid. The calculations are entered as standard Excel formulae, so users already know the syntax. All Excel formuale are supported, and the calculation is cube-aware once entered as shown in the video below.

We also let users easily create workbook level calculated members and sets, but in our experience what 90% of users actually want is to be able to add a simple calculated column into a PivotTable (or in our case a grid). They’re really not asking for much, and we’re happy to help.

We can also help where PivotTable users are experiencing performance issues, hierarchy selection restrictions, “PivotTable will overwrite” messages, etc. We keep the Excel flexibility users love, and lose the PivotTable restrictions they loathe. See our PivotTable comparison for more detail on some of the common user problems we address.

Uncategorized

Swiss Customer Event

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Last week we held a very successful XLCubed user event in the Starling Conference Centre, Geneva with our partner Evolusys. These events are a great opportunity to engage with our key customers first hand to get their thoughts and feedback and also to share ideas for future development. Thanks to all who attended, it was a productive and enjoyable day

The message which shone through was that what our customers value most about XLCubed is the flexibility. The mix of Excel itself extended with a focused BI client gives a degree of flexibility that other tools just don’t come close to.  “There is always a way” was a phrase mentioned by several of the attendees, and great to hear from our perspective.

We used part of the day as the first public preview of Version 9, and we were delighted by the feedback. Extending the reach of the product to additional data sources like SQL, Power BI and Excel was extremely popular and the slick ‘panel view’ dashboards and responsive UI really resonated. We now ‘just’ need to finish development over the summer and look forward to bringing v9 to market!

Keep watching this space for more info on v9…

Analytics, BI

DAX Performance tips– lessons from the field

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XLCubed has supported a drag/drop interface for creating reports against Tabular Analysis Services since the first release of the new engine. It lets users easily create reports which run DAX queries on the cube, and we’ve often seen very good performance at customers when MDX against Tabular was a cause of long running reports.

So when we were approached at SQL Pass in Seattle by some attendees who had a SSAS Tabular performance issue we were optimistic we’d be able to help.

In this case the business wanted to retrieve thousands of rows from the cube at the transactional level, and the first approach had been to use PivotTables in Excel. To get to the lowest level they cross-joined the lowest levels of all the hierarchies on the rows section which would give the right result, but performance was terrible, with several queries taking 20 minutes or more and others not returning at all.

We hoped using an XLCubed table running DAX would be the solution and created the same report in the designer. Sadly while performance was a little better it was still far from acceptable; the model was large, and the number or columns combined with their cardinality meant that a lot of work was being done on the server.

XLCubed’s DAX generator was trying to cross-join all the values from each column, which had worked well for our other customers. But when there are a dozen columns including the transaction ID things do not go so well. DAX in itself is not a magic bullet and SSAS Tabular models can hit performance problems on low level data – we needed a new approach.

After some investigation we discussed the issue and our thinking with our friends at SQLBI and determined that instead of cross-join we wanted an option to use Summarize() instead as this only uses the rows in the database, and it can access columns related to the summarized table which were required for the report.

As the customer’s report had the transaction ID in it the result wasn’t aggregated, even though we were using summarize. But we wanted to add true transactional reporting too, using the Related() function.

Finally, SQL 2016 adds a couple of new functions, SummarizeColumns() and SelectColumns(), both of which are useful for this type of reporting, but offer better performance than the older equivalents.

The end result in XLCubed is a new option for DAX tables to allow users to set the type of report they want to run, and some internal changes so that XLCubed will automatically use the most efficient DAX function where they are available.

A beta was sent to the business users and the results were fantastic. The report which had run for several minutes now completed in a few seconds, and 20 minutes was down to 15 seconds – we had some very happy users!

The changes will be in the next release of XLCubed so that all our customers can benefit from the improvements. It’s always nice when a customer request helps improve the product for everyone.

A sample of the syntax change is included below

Before:

 

EVALUATE
FILTER (
    ADDCOLUMNS (
        KEEPFILTERS (
            CROSSJOIN ( VALUES ( 'Customer'[Education] ), VALUES ( 'Product'[Color] ) )
        ),
        "Internet Total Units", 'Internet Sales'[Internet Total Units],
        "Internet Total Sales", 'Internet Sales'[Internet Total Sales]
    ),
    NOT ISBLANK ( [Internet Total Units] )
)
ORDER BY
    'Customer'[Education],
    'Product'[Color]

After:

 

EVALUATE
FILTER (
    ADDCOLUMNS (
        KEEPFILTERS (
            SUMMARIZE ( 'Internet Sales', 'Customer'[Education], 'Product'[Color] )
        ),
        "Internet Total Units", 'Internet Sales'[Internet Total Units],
        "Internet Total Sales", 'Internet Sales'[Internet Total Sales]
    ),
    NOT ISBLANK ( [Internet Total Units] ) || NOT ISBLANK ( [Internet Total Sales] )
)
ORDER BY
    'Customer'[Education],
    'Product'[Color]
Blog, Charts, Reporting, Uncategorized, Visualization

Report Flexibility, with Control

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Sometimes we want to let report users modify the structure of a report but to govern exactly what they can and can’t do. While Grids can be restricted at a granular level to enable and disable functionality, that approach still requires some degree of product knowledge by the user.

XLCubed provides the XL3SetProperty() formula, which enables manipulation of many of the core objects such as Grids, Slicers and Small Multiples. It means report users can have simple slicer selections to change the structure of a report, what’s being displayed in a chart, or to vary the chart type. It gives flexibility within the report, but requires no product knowledge from the end user which can be crucial when delivering web reports on a widespread basis.

One common example of usage is where the hierarchy to be viewed in a grid needs to change based on the measure a user selects (depending on the structure of the cube some measures may not be applicable for all hierarchies). Typically that would need to be handled in two Grids, but we can use XL3SetProperty to bring this together, and also to give user choice on the associated Small Multiple Chart view.

The final published report is shown below:

 

S1

 

If the user selects an “Internet” measure, we show Customer Geography on rows, whereas a “Reseller” measure should show Reseller Type on rows. The same logic applies to the Small Multiple chart. In the screenshot below, the user has selected Reseller Gross Profit as the measure, and ‘Stacked Column’ as the chart type. You can see that the hierarchy on rows has been switched, as has the split within the individual charts, allowing the user to easily vary their view of the data with simple button selectors.

 

S2

 

This is implemented through the following key points:

  • A lookup table in Excel to determine what hierarchy is applicable for each measure
  • An Excel list showing the available chart types – this is used in the Chart Type slicer
    • The chart slicer outputs its selection into cell $AG$10
  • The measure slicer is linked directly to the grid and the small multiple, but also outputs its selection to an Excel cell ($A$B4)
  • A vlookup determines which hierarchy to use based on the selected measure
  • Three XL3SetProperty() formulae now control what is displayed based on user selections:
    • $AB$7 – sets the grid rows
    • $AB$8 – sets the small multiple columns
    • $AB$7 – sets the chart type

 

Formulae

 

The approach gives a deep level of access to the key XLCubed reporting objects, and enables controlled flexibility within web and mobile-delivered reports. No programming is needed, just a mid-level understanding of Excel itself, and XLCubed.

This is just one example of what the approach can achieve – it’s really limited only by imagination. See XL3SetProperty() for more detail, or contact us if you’d like the example workbook.

Analytics, BI, Blog, General, Reporting, Uncategorized

Cell-Linked Decomposition view

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In displaying the key and often high level information required, many reports raise lots of additional questions in terms of why a specific number is ‘too high’ or ‘too low’, or how the number is comprised. XLCubed provides lots of ways for power users to further explore and visualise this, but in this blog we’ll take a look at one of the simplest and easiest to implement within a report – a cell-linked decomposition view, or a dynamic breakout.

The scenario below is a fairly straightforward Regional Sales report which will be deployed to management through XLCubed Web. When users click on a sales number for a specific region and month we want to provide them with a ranking to show the top 10 products which were contributing to that revenue. We provide a number of ways to achieve that but this is by far the simplest:

Select any of the values returned in the Grid and then either use the ‘Breakout’ option on the Grid Ribbon, or right click and choose XLCubed – Breakout Value. You now specify where to position the resulting breakout, which hierarchy to decompose the number by, at what level, and how many ranked items to show.

BODialog

 

In this example we’ve chosen the top 10 Products at the SubCategory level. The result is shown below. The green cell in the original grid is the cell the user has selected and is ‘tracked’, so when another cell in the grid is selected the breakout updates accordingly, meaning users can easily explore the makeup of their data.

 

BO Result1

 

The breakout result can be further decomposed by running another breakout, this time on the product subcategory. In the published example below we’ve run an additional breakout showing the top ranked products in the selected subcategory.

WebBO

 

The report user can now simply click on the values which are of interest to see the associated product sales breakdown, and it’s something which can be built in minutes by the report designer.

Blog, General, Reporting, Uncategorized

Finding a needle in a haystack – Member Searching made easy!

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Searching for specific elements of large hierarchies can be a real pain in many Analysis Services client tools, and we often hear of it as a major frustration in Pivot Tables where dialogs can be cumbersome and prone to locking up.

XLCubed has both a Quicksearch and an Advanced search in the Member Selector, but in this blog we’ll show how to link the search dynamically to an Excel cell (or a web entry cell on a published report) and to retain the search as a dynamic part of the report rather than a point in time selection.

Let’s say we are a retailer with a large product hierarchy running to tens or hundreds of thousands of products. The naming convention means groups of products can be searched by a partial match on their name, and as a report designer we’d like the users to be able to type the search in as quickly and easily as possible rather than go into a custom search dialog. Here’s how:

Below is the final result in Excel, a simple list-report where the user just types the text they want to search the hierarchy for, and matching products are shown on the rows of the report.

Search1

 

We start with a regular grid, putting Product Categories on rows, and then in the Member Selector we can either select a specific level or set of data to be searched, or go to the Advanced tab and select the whole hierarchy as shown below.

EditHierarchy

 

 

In the advanced dialog, click on the binoculars:

Binoculars

 

to add a search, and then in the dialog below you can either type a search term directly in the ‘Search Value’ or reference an Excel cell, in this case $C$3. ‘Search By’ allows you to specify exact match, begins, contains etc.

Search2

 

At this point it’s worth mentioning that while in this case we are just searching by the name of the product (MEMBER_CAPTION) we could also chose to search by any member properties which exist.

So having done that we simply type the search string into $C$3 and we get the matching products straight away – couldn’t be easier.

To make this available for web deployed reports there are two additional steps:

  • Make $C$3 available for web input. To do that right click on the cell and choose Format cells, and then on the protection tab uncheck ‘locked’.
  • Add a search or refresh hyperlink or button so that the web user can refresh the report when they’ve typed the search term. This can be handled using either XL3Link() or XL3Picturelink and the process is described in our previous blog.

The web version is shown below:

Websearch

Blog, Reporting, Uncategorized, Visualization

Click & Submit!

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We’ve had a few queries recently where customers want to provide web reports with a number of slicer choices, and to have the report refresh just once when all selections are made, rather than the default refresh after each selection. It can be achieved in a couple of ways in XLCubed, read on for more…

The key to this approach work is the ‘Wait for Submit on Web’ option on the slicer properties, shown below on the Behaviour tab of the slicer designer:

sub1

This means when the slicer is changed it does not refresh the report straight away, and if you set this on multiple slicers users can then press the ‘submit changes’ button on the toolbar shown below after they’ve made their selections.

sub2

 

Alternatively, and to make it more obvious for web users you can have them click on some text or an image in the report itself to call the refresh, as in the examples below.

I’ve created a simple report below with five different slicers.  Note the “Refresh“ to the right, created using XL3Link().

sub3

 

The XL3Link statement is available from the Insert Formula menu on the XLCubed ribbon:

 

sub4

 

It’s most often used to move the focus to another area of the report while passing parameters to enabled linked-analysis in a multi-sheet report. However, here we can use it to call a refresh.

We can leave the “Link to” parameter blank, and also the Target and Value cells. The last parameter, LinkType calls SubmitChanges on the web, so the syntax will look like below (you will need to update the XL3Link statement to include this parameter):

=XL3Link(,”Refresh”,3)

There is more guidance on the general use of XL3Link on our Wiki at: http://www.xlcubed.com/help/XL3Link

So when we publish our report to our web server we can change the slicer choices as required but it’s only when we click the Refresh button that the report is refreshed.

sub5

 

If we’d prefer to display an image for the user to click on rather than text we can use XL3PictureLink in a similar way.  When using XL3PictureLink we can display any picture – we’ve used a generic refresh icon but it could easily be a more corporate-applicable image:

sub6

XL3PictureLInk is also available from the Insert Formula menu on the XLCubed ribbon:

sub7

Browse in the window above to locate the Picture file to insert and remember to check the Perform a Submit Changes on Web box.

There is more guidance on XL3PictureLink on our Wiki at: http://www.xlcubed.com/help/Picture_Links

This is the published report using XL3PictureLink, the user makes the required selections and clicks refresh.sub8

 

So it’s as easy as that – two ways to ensure that your users can change multiple slicers on web-published reports before calling the refresh, and without you having to direct them to the standard submit changes on web button.

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