Tag: Link

The Missing Link in Excel BI

XLCubed/ / Reporting & Analytics

When viewing a high level summary report or dashboard, users often want to delve into more detail on a specific area. In some cases that may be a drill down, in many others it may be to a different view of the data or to an entirely different report. In the XLCubed example below, users can link from any one of the summary KPIs to a detail report showing product level detail for the selected KPI.

This is a fairly common requirement in reporting. In a standard Excel context, it would be easy to add a hyperlink formula to jump across to another sheet, but that’s just part of what’s needed. In this example we need to link in the context of the selected KPI, otherwise we would need a separate sheet for product detail on each KPI, far from ideal, especially in row-dynamic reports.

This type of limitation is one reason why you’ll often see workbooks with huge numbers of worksheets, which become unwieldy and horrible to maintain.

We need hyperlink functionality but also an ability to pass parameters (and of course a way for the pivot table to accept the incoming parameter…).

XLCubed makes it straightforward for non-technical users to build this type of contextual linking into reports through the XL3Link() formula.  XL3Link has arguments which determine what is displayed in the cell, where it hyperlinks to, and what cell(s) parameters are passed from and to.

Unlike Pivot tables, XLCubed Grids and formulae can reference cell content as a filter, so the data on the ‘link to’ worksheet can update as soon as a new value is passed into the driving cell, retrieving the relevant data from whichever data source is involved.

The beauty of the approach is its simplicity. It’s something which most users can get to grips with quickly, and opens up huge flexibility in joined up reporting.

Last but not least, web and mobile deployment takes a matter of seconds. The report is published to XLCubed Web and from there browser and mobile app based users have access to the same report with the same chain of thought links. The links can be to different content in the same report, to a separate report, or a url to another application or website.

 

(This piece revisits content from our blog  from several years back the missing link part 1   . The business requirement it addresses is now even more common, and still one not handled in native Excel.)

Dynamic Tooltips / Mouseover

XLCubed/ / Reporting & Analytics

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

 

 

Cell-Linked Decomposition view

XLCubed/ / Reporting & Analytics

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.