BIAnalytix Tip Summary: Visual Totals displayed on Business Intelligence Analysis Reports

Many presentation tools, including Excel pivot tables, support the selection of a subset of the rows or columns from the dimension members displayed on a report. The data selected through this “sub-select” are called the “visual members”. This data “sub-select” filter is in addition to the filters for the overall report. When using the sub-select filter, the column or row totals can either display the total of all the dimension members, or only total the “visual members” chosen with the sub-select. The preferable behavior is to only total the visible members. In any BI reporting tool, this is known as the “Visual Totals” reporting feature.

Often “Calculated Measures” accumulate all dimension members ignoring the sub-selection on the report and thus do not support the “Visual Total” behavior, clearly confusing report users. A mixture of visual-totals and overall totals is certainly not acceptable on user reports. Extreme care is needed to either define “Calculated Measures” that display the “Visual Totals” or alternatively, produce “Real Measure” overall totals that ignore the row sub-selects so that all the report totals are consistent and clearly understood by users.

BIAnalytix is the advanced Media data warehouse and Business Intelligence solution from Decentrix which provides selected calculated measures that present “Visual Totals” so that reporting by modern presentation tools provides consistent totals.

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