Advice and techniques regarding report creation and analytics e.g. slicers, ranking, driving from a range etc.
//Many BI and reporting tools now allow users to collaborate directly with a report. This avoids the cumbersome backwards and forwards of email chains or the need to meet in person.
As useful as this is, some organisations have concerns about the ability to monitor comments made. We will discuss this aspect in more depth after a brief introduction to comments and collaboration.
Continue reading “Monitoring Data Comments”
//This weeks blog is for the more technically minded among our user base and our partner network – not for everyone, but highlights some potentially very powerful capabilities!
We will be looking at using MDX: and MDXSet: along with Query Generators to create sub-cubes, meaning we can develop advanced reports that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.
//As we’ve seen in the past, XL3Link is a flexible formula that is really worth knowing about to help easily build interlinked reports. To some extent it’s like a Swiss army knife – multi-purpose! From highlighting a series on a chart to hosting a tooltip, XL3Link is a flexible formula that can help make your reporting more interactive at multiple levels.
In this post we’ll be discussing a few more novel ways to use XL3Link.
//XLCubed is a great tool when it comes to member searching: it allows you to quickly and easily find members as well as dynamically update a report based on search parameters. Take a read of our last post to get started with this functionality.
The example in this post uses these searching methods to create a product search page. The left side provides search functionality for all the products contained in the cube, with a link to select the product which displays the full details on the right side.
Continue reading “Member Searching To Create A Product Details Page”
//Most formatting in XLCubed can be handled though the formatting options available on the right-click menu, and today’s blog will cover some of the common use cases.
//XLCubed has lots of options for Ranking, Sorting and Filtering (And Searching. And Grouping. And, and and … 😉)
As well as all of these, one often overlooked aspect of the Advanced member selector is the member combination mode.
This enables lots of interesting scenarios, especially as you can run more advanced selections on the results of these.
//Propagate across Sheets
Today’s blog will run through Propagate across Sheets – it’s an XLCubed feature that’s been around for some time but is definitely one of our hidden gems!
Propagate across Sheets is some great functionality that allows users to quickly replicate a report onto additional sheets within the same workbook or a new workbook.
//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.
Continue reading “Workbook Aspects – Same Report, Different View”
//Today’s blog will run through XLCubed’s commentary functionality.
At XLCubed we have seen a lot of customer interest in commentary and collaboration in the last couple of years.
We’re all familiar with the standard comments functionality in Excel where you add a comment to an Excel cell.
However, in a dynamic BI environment it can be limiting. For example, say I add an Excel comment to cell $C$10, then the comment is tied to that specific cell. If a user changes a filter selection, the numbers change but the comment does not and may not now be relevant.
This is where XLCubed commentary shines through.
//Slicers are normally used to change filter selections in a report, but a less well-known use is for report navigation, to allow users to jump to another location in the workbook.
