A common scenario in business reporting is for different users to want reports to open with ‘their’ view on the data. So for a particular Store or business unit.
Many back-ends already support setting Default Members for different users and groups, for example Analysis Services allows this, but as XLCubed can connect to an increasing number of back-ends we can’t rely on this and sometimes a single report user may have different combinations of views on data (for example, a set of store/product group combinations)
Version 9.2 of XLCubed has added Workbook Aspects to help with this, allowing users to store their own slicer selections and quickly switch between those and also to set the default for when the report is loaded.
With this feature you can define the aspects at a report level, shared by all users, and also allow users to define their own private aspects.
Workbook aspects are closely tied with Web Parameters. These are simple to setup in XLCubed and allow a cell or range of cells to be defined as parameters. In this case we need to define 2 parameters “Location” and “Product Type”:
Once the web parameters have been defined you can link them to directly to slicers by selecting them as the output range of the slicer:
You can setup workbook aspects to work in 2 ways, a predefined list of aspects and/or the option for the end user to store the “current” view as a new aspect. Additionally the report user can select which aspect is shown when the report first loads.
Once the report is viewed, then there are simple options to let users switch between the aspects, create personal aspects and set the default aspect.
It provides a very fast way for users to switch between common data selections, particularly where there are a lot of separate slicers in the overall report.
Aspects are not just limited to slicers, as long as a web parameter has been setup on a range then it can be stored in an aspect, with the use of the XL3SetProperty and XL3Link formula this gives you massive scope for allowing a high-level of report customisation.