//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.
//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:
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.
This is implemented through the following key points:
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.
//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.
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.
In the advanced dialog, click on the 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.
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:
The web version is shown below:
