Consuming analytics

We turn first to Analysis Reports and Analysis Chart. We discuss them together because they are two different views of the underlying Analysis resource type. Starting with an Analysis Report, you can hide the Table and show the Chart to translate the Analysis Report into an Analysis Chart. We’ll discuss this point further when we get to analytic design.

This point is relevant to consuming analytics because the slice experience is identical between the two different data views. For Analyses resources, the slicers are present at the top. Click the drop-down arrow for a given slicer to interact with it. You may also enter search criteria to filter the list of displayed members, as in the following image.

Depending on the slicer-type configured by the designed multi-select and range-slice options may be available to you.

Whether you’re viewing a chart or table, you may wish to see the detail at a more “granular” level (think of grains of sand as an example of granular, where a large block of sandstone is non-granular). For example, in the following custom table built for these examples, quarters are presented on rows, and you may wish to look at specific months. The simplest solution to this uses the expander icons, as in the following image.

As an alternative, you may wish to replace all the specific quarter from the previous example and replace it with the relevant months. This is a Drill Down and is available using right-click menu for the table or the chart.

The results are as follows.

You reverse this action with Drill Up from the same right-click menu.

Lastly, you may wish to navigate to a different resource to provide an alternate view of the selected data. We consider this drilling-through the data to the target resource. The most common target view provides full detail on the records or transactions that compose the select values.

As with drill-down, drill-through can be performed on a table or a chart and is available from the same right-click menu. The Create Detail Report is always available and will provide a record or transaction level view of the selected data. If the analytic designer has added additional drill-through targets, these will show immediately above Create Detail Report, as in the following image.

The selected Create Detail Report on Q1 2020 shows in the following. Note that a Quarter slicer was automatically added to make it easier to change your drill-through selection after the fact.

Returning to the Purchasing manager dashboard, we previously saw that dashboards are composed of Analysis Reports, Analysis Charts, and Rich Texts. All of these resources exist within the cells of a dashboard. While reports and charts present data in a very structured format, Rich Texts provide a more free form presentation of data. They can help convey multiple metrics in a dashboard cell, as in the following image.

Rich Texts also cater for embedded images and HTML. It is unlikely you would ever consume a Rich Text resource directly. However, now that you’re familiar with them, you will see them used extensively in the Data Hub pre-built analytic suites.

Turning to dashboard slicing, you will see the now-familiar slicing controls from the top of the Purchasing manager dashboard. These work exactly as they do for Analyses slicing.

Dashboards also introduce another form of slicing, inter-cell slicing, where-in making a selection in one cell then provides the slice context for another cell. We can see this by zooming in on the bottom row of cells.

Observe the right-hand-side chart, and now by selecting vendors, we can slice the chart, as in the following image.

We selected multiple rows by holding down Shift while selecting the vendors in this image.

Dashboards also introduce another layer for drill-though. You can still drill down and drill-through on the Analysis Reports within cells using the method described above. This will navigate to a target resource filtered for the report selections You can also drill-through from the Dashboard’s cells. In this case, there is no report level selection so that a dashboard-cell drill-through will navigate for the target resource, filtered for the context of the dashboard cell.

To drill-through on a dashboard cell, open the resource and then hover to show the vertical ellipsis, then select the desired drill-through target.

To round out consuming analytics, let’s discuss some common capabilities that apply to all the resource types we’ve discussed so far. You can print, email, or link-share from the Resource Context Menu, shown when you click on the vertical ellipsis.

To print, select Print Preview, which generates a PDF you can then send to your printer. You can also see the Add to Favorites option to provide quick access to commonly-used resources from the Resource Explorer from the same menu.

In driving this introduction from a dashboard, we haven’t had the opportunity to introduce two additional resource types that you may encounter. Report Packs offer a document-focused presentation alternative to dashboards by generating PDF documents. Report packs commonly combine with Publication Rules. Publication Rules define schedules and triggers on which to “publish” resources. The publish options are:

We won’t look further at these two resources, as the online documentation has you covered. Again, this quick introduction intends to make you aware of what is available and provide context for the analytic building topics to come.

One final note on consuming analytics, Data Hub provides a separate touch-optimized mobile view. This mobile view will automatically show on mobile and tablet devices. Now that you’re familiar with the above topics, you will find the mobile view intuitive and easy to use, but should you need specific guidance, you can refer to this article.