Eat, Sleep, Report, Repeat!

Repeaters are a visualisation feature introduced in v9.1.  They are effective when you want to repeat a formatted section of a report by one variable.  They can save so much time as you don’t have to go through the tedious, error-prone task of recreating the same section many times by copying and pasting manually.  Imagine the time you’d save setting the design up just once and have the repetition handled by XLCubed!

Here’s an example of a repeater:

Our repeater is based on an XLCubed grid, filtered by Geography, with a panel consisting of formulae with XLCubed In-Cell charts and PictureLinks.  Additionally, each panel is conditionally formatted, with the colouring based on ratio of 3-month and 12-month average sales.

The great thing about XLCubed Repeaters is that you can include any XLCubed or Excel content in them!

Let’s see how easy it is to design our repeater – click Visualise > Repeater on the XLCubed ribbon and in the Designer window define the hierarchy to be repeated by dragging it to the Repeater Setup area.  Similarly, you can also set up any additional filters.

Click OK and then set the content of the repeater by setting up the three key ranges:

• Repeat range – The entire area required to generate the report for one repetition. It needs to include all the source data and formulae used in the area to be displayed – the area within the blue border below
• Render range – the display area which will be repeated and shown in the final report – the area within red border
• Input range – the location where the member parameter will be inserted by the repeater, the cell with a green border. This will be used as the selection criteria for XLCubed Grids or formulae within the ‘Repeat Range’.

You can move/resize the repeater, set borders and margins from the Appearance tab.

You can easily include more items in your repeater by moving them in the Render range.

Remember, you can use any Excel content – in the example below we have a standard Excel chart that we want to also include at the top of our repeater:

Drag the chart into the top of your Render Range (resize as necessary) and your chart now appears like this:

It’s as simple as that!  Set up your repeater once and no more worrying that you’ve missed vital bits of information!

For more details see the Repeaters page on our Wiki:  https://help.xlcubed.com/Repeaters

…and a YouTube video which runs through this example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3hYF8vkz-M

For all you football fans out there, our blog on the Premier League transfer window also has an example highlighting the use of repeaters:  https://blog.xlcubed.com/2017/09/charting-the-premier-league-transfer-window/

As always we would love to hear your feedback!