An Aster Plot for the Holidays

Yesterday was Christmas and for those who celebrate Christmas, I hope you had a very happy day. However, I just wanted to ask this. Why do we wait for Christmas to be nice to one another, to wish our fellow man peace on earth and goodwill to all men? And do we really mean it or do we just go back to our old ways the day after. Do we need a holiday to be nice to each other? Why cannot the Christmas spirit spread throughout the year? And why does it have to be tied to a religious holiday. Do we need a religious holiday to tell us when to be nice to others?

On a similar note, New Year’s resolutions are coming up in another week. Could we all possibly resolve to act a little more like Christmas every day of the year? Or is that just as hard as resolving to lose weight?

Anyway, since many of you are on vacation anyway this week, I’m going to do just a short blog on the Aster Plot visualization for Power BI. This visualization, like many of the others I’ve talked about can be found on Microsoft’s Power BI Visualization Gallery page. When you click on the Aster Plot tile, the following diagram displays telling you a little about the visualization which as they state in the description is related to a donut chart. However, unlike a donut chart which defines the size of the donut segment on the value associated with that segment much like a pie chart, an aster plot uses one dimension to define the segments and each segment is equal in the amount of the arc it uses. The value associated with the segment defines the radius of the segment instead. Let’s see how this might work with some of the sales data by product category from Contoso.

I’m not going to go through all the dialogs that appear when you download a new visualization. I’ve done that before. So if you are joining in for the first time, check back through some of my previous blogs for details on that.

After the visualization is downloaded, I can load it into my Visualizations toolset/panel by clicking the ellipsis (3 dots) at the bottom of the visualizations panel.

Power BI will display a warning to caution you about importing custom visualization, so you should always do this on a test machine first to make sure they do not cause any issues. Just because it is on a Microsoft page does not mean that it is safe to use and does not violate any privacy concerns.

Next, I loaded my Contoso data and displayed the Sales Amount by Product Category as shown in the table below. (Again, if you do not know how to do this is Power BI, I’ve covered this several times in the past several months.) I should mention that I specifically sorted the sales data in descending order for this visualization.

Then with my table selected, I can click on my new visualization, the Aster Plot which displays the chart shown below.

Notice that if I hover over any of the segments, a box appears that tells me the product category name along with the corresponding sales amount for that category. One of the things that I don’t particularly care for is that the name of the dimension appears in the center of the chart and apparently behind the arcs so some that some of the name is covered by the chart. I wish I could move the dimension name either to the top of the bottom of the chart at the very least. Of course I could customize the name to make it smaller or to add spaces between the words back on the data page, but for this demonstration, I didn’t feel the need.

You can have other charts on the same page like the one shown here that displays the Sales Amounts by calendar year for Contoso.

Like other visualizations, I can click on any of the Aster plot segments to select that category and the column chart to the right will automatically update to highlight the annual sale for the selected category while still showing in a lighter shade of the column color to total annual sales.

Similarly, I can select a year and the Aster plot will be redrawn to display the relative sizes of each of the categories as shown below.

Well, that is all I’m going to cover for this week because it is time to get back to end-of-year celebrations, visiting relatives, after-Christmas sales, and all those things.

C’ya next year.

Getting the Right Context – Part 2

Last time, I introduced the concept of context within DAX expressions using by PowerPivot to calculate columns and measures. We saw that the default context for column calculations was row context while the default context for measures was filtered context. However, I ended the discussion by showing that within a measure calculation, I could use column context with certain aggregate functions like SUMX which can be used to apply an expression across all the rows of a table. However, before that expression is evaluated, that table is automatically filtered since I used it in a measure which begins by applying the filtered context of the pivot table to the rows used by the expression.

So this time, let’s dive a little deeper. Let me begin by going to the FactSales table of my Contoso data model and calculate a measure for total sales. This is not difficult and can be achieved by using the SUM() function as shown in the following figure.

Now let’s assume that I want a measure that shows only the sales made through the store channel. At first, I might try to use the SUMX() function along with the FILTER() function. The FILTER() function also has two parameters. The first parameter is the name of the table that I want to apply a filter on. The second parameter is a filter expression. I may at first assume that because I created a relationship between the FactSales table and the DimChannel table, that I can simply reference the column [ChannelName] and compare it to the string “Store” to filter the FactSales table. However, as you can see in the following figure, this expression would result in an error.

The reason for the error is that while the FILTER() function references the table FactSales, there is no context to link records in FactSales to DimChannel. I know you might ask, “Doesn’t the relation between these two tables define that context?” The answer is that the relationship between tables while defining the ‘mechanism’ of how to connect the two tables, it does not activate a context between the rows in FactSales with a row in DimChannel. When pointing from the many side of a relationship to the one side of the relationship, we must use the RELATED() function to activate the context within the expression. I show this in the following figure.

You can see that now I have a total sales for the just the stores as a measure. If I use this measure in a pivot table that displays sales by month and by product category, I will have the additional filter of sales by store in each of the pivot table cells.

What if, however, I wanted to create a calculated column in the table DimChannel that displayed the total sales for that channel? Again you might start with the SUMX() function because you want to calculate an expression from another table. In this case, the first parameter of the SUMX() function would be the FactSales table and the column that we want to sum would be the [SalesAmount] column. However, if we were to create this column, we might be surprised by the result, shown in the following figure.

All of the values in the column are exactly the same. Furthermore, if I refer to the image earlier in this blog for the total sales across all channels, I would see that the value displayed here in each cell of the column is actually the total sales. Again the problem is context. There is no context to refer back to FactSales from DimChannel. Therefore, when SUMX() evaluates the [SalesAmount] in table FactSales, it pulls values from all the sales records, not just the sales from the channel represented by the current row in DimChannel.

In this case, because I am going from the one side of the DimChannel relationship to the many side of FactSales, I need to return a table that contains just the rows from FactSales that represent sales from the channel in the context of the current row. I can do this by using the RELATEDTABLE() function which uses a single parameter, the name of the table on the many side of the relationship. I must also have the relationship explicitly defined between DimChannel and FactSales. I have already done this. So Power Pivot can use the relationship to create a subset of rows from FactSales for the current channel. I can then use this resulting table in the SUMX() function to sum the [SalesAmount] column as shown in the following figure.

As you can see in the figure, the first row which represents the store channel displays the same sales total as we calculated from the measure in FactSales earlier.

So again, you can see that there are many different ways to define the context of an expression. When dealing with multiple tables, it is important to understand whether you can perform a row context calculation by using the RELATED() function to extend the row context to the related table on the lookup side of the relationship or whether you need to use the RELATEDTABLE() function to filter the rows used in an aggregate function like SUMX() to calculate values for a column which uses the row context to define the link to the many side table.

Next time, I’ll look at some functions that let you turn off a filtered context and show where you might use it.

C’ya next time.

Can You Put That Into Context For Me?

Over the past several years, I’ve conducted many sessions on how to use DAX in PowerPivot to create columns and measures. Throughout this time, the one thing that has confused many people with whom I have talked with is the concept of context for an expression. Many do not understand why some equations appear to work across for defining new columns while other equations only appear to work when calculating measures within a pivot table. This week, and perhaps for another week or two, I am going to take a shot at explaining the concept of context. Until you get a good understanding of context, many of the DAX expressions for columns and measures may appear to be magic that somehow get the correct answer but you may just not understand why.

Let me start by defining the two major context types that DAX expressions have to deal with:

1. Row Context – This is probably the easiest context to understand. When you define a formula to calculate the value for a new column, the formula is applied to each row individually. In fact, the value calculated can depend only on the value of other columns in the current row. This is much like the way you calculate a new column value in Excel. However, unlike Excel, it is more restrictive. Using Row Context, it is not possible to directly access the values in a prior or successive row because those terms do not really have meaning within a table in the data model of a pivot table.
2. Filtered Context – This is probably easiest to understand when you think of the entire set of rows in a table. If you sum a numeric column or simply count any column in the table, you are applying a filtered context. Of course, in its simplest form, the filter is really the same as all of the rows in the table, or no filter at all. But let’s assume for a moment that you have a sales table that includes sales from each of your stores in each of the states of United States. Furthermore, you only want to know the sales for stores in the state of Florida. In database terms, you apply a filter using a WHERE clause to include only those rows from the sales table in which the sales came from a store in Florida. Of course you can have more than one filter. You might filter not only on the state, but also on a specific product that was sold during a specific month of a specific year. That would require four filters to be applied to the table to reduce the total number of rows of sales to only those you wanted to sum. Filtered context is often used in expressions that involve summing, counting, averaging, finding a minimum or finding a maximum. These are also referred to as aggregate functions.

So let’s see how this works in DAX. Using my Contoso sales table, suppose I want to calculate the profit for each sale. Since I want to perform the calculation per sale and because my sales table has one row for each sale, I can use a calculated column. The formula for my calculated column begins by taking the value of the column [SalesAmount] which is the money received from the sale. This is not the profit. To calculate profit, I need to subtract costs from [SalesAmount]. To do this, I can subtract the value from the column [TotalCost]. This gives me a pretty good idea of what my potential profit might be. However, in the Contoso data, I also have to consider any returned item. These are items returned because they are damaged or do not work. The policy is to refund the customer their money. However, the returned product it not worth anything and is considered trash. Therefore, I need to also subtract from [SalesAmount] the [ReturnAmount]. If I define a new column in my sales table, I can use the formula shown in the following figure to calculate the profit for each of the sales.

As you know, the PowerPivot data model applies the column formula to each record in the table. I can then use this column in pivot tables to display profit for sales by any of the appropriate dimensions such as time, location, product, etc.

Fortunately, in PowerPivot for Excel, displaying profit in the pivot table is as simple as moving the column [Profit] to the Values area in the field list. PowerPivot lets us use any numeric field in the values area without any additional work. However, if I attempt to create the same model in Analysis Services, I must create a measure as shown below.

The SUM() function is an aggregate function and therefore defines a measure, never a column. Note however, I must still first create the column [Profit] as previously defined. I cannot simply create a measure that sums the result of the expression as shown in the following figure.

This is because the calculation: [SalesAmount] – [TotalCost] – [ReturnAmount] is a row context expression since it must be calculated on every row of the table. However the SUM() function is a filter context expression (even if the filter is all the rows). I cannot combine the two in this expression without getting the Semantic Error shown above. The SUM() function can only aggregate the values of a single column, not aggregate the values of a calculation.

What I can do however, is use one of the other DAX functions, SUMX(). This function has two parameters, the first parameter is the name of the table I want to perform a calculation on. In this case, the table name is FactSales. The second parameter is an expression that can include one or more columns from the designated table. In this case, I can use the expression I previously used to calculate the [Profit] column as shown in the following figure.

As you can see in this figure, the resulting total profit across all the records in the FactSales table is exactly the same whether I use the expression SUM([Profit]) which sums the calculated column or if I use the expressions SUMX(FactSales, [SalesAmount] – [TotalCost] – [ReturnAmount]). This second expression essentially calculates the row context expression for profit on each row in the table FactSales. However, as a measure rather a calculated column, the expression is filtered by any dimensions used in the pivot table.

In the following figure, the only dimension is sales channel. Therefore, with four sales channels, there are four rows. Note that both calculations of total profit result in the same values for each channel.

What is the difference between the two? Since all of the sales records were used to build this table since all four sales channels were included, the same number of calculations were effectively performed in both cases, calculating the profit for each sales row and then summing the profit for each channel. The only real difference is that the first one required the prior creation of a [Profit] column which takes some of the precious data model memory while the second method using the SUMX() function does not require that column.

But what if we applied other dimensions any perhaps by using a slicer displayed the profit from only some of the sales. In the following example, the row dimension displays countries. However, only countries in Asia appear based on a slicer that limits which continent I want to see profits. I also included a slicer on year to limit the years in my analysis to only two years. Therefore, in the following figure, the profit amounts represent only a subset of the total profits for the Contoso organization.

How does this affect the calculation? To calculate Total_Profit, I still need the column [Profit] to calculate value for every sales row in the FactSales table, even rows that I will not use. On the other hand, to calculate Total_Profit_2, the filter on continent and year is applied first limited the total number of rows that are needed to be calculated from the FactSales table. The calculation of profit is then only performed on this filtered subset of rows and then aggregated appropriately based on the dimensions shown.

Thus, you might say for now that column calculations are generally row context and measures are filter context expressions. However some functions when used in measures let you perform a row context expression after applying a filter context like the SUMX() function and other aggregate functions that end in ‘X’ like COUNTX(), AVERAGEX(), MAXX(), and MINX().

Next time, I will dive a little further into understanding context within DAX.

C’ya next time.

It’s a Fiscal Thing

In past blog articles, I’ve talked about the need for a date table, not just for BI/PowerPivot analysis, but for any application. You might be hard pressed to come up with many applications you have written or have used in your organizations that do not include some aspect of time as one of the dimensions by which you collect data and/or report on it. Therefore, building a Date table once that you can use for many different applications can save you a great deal of time when trying to determine how to group your data for different reporting period or to display different date labels along one of your dimensions.

One of the easiest ways to build a date table that you can use anywhere is to begin with Excel. It is a simple matter to create a column called DateKey and enter the first two dates of a large general purpose date range as shown in the following figure.

Then to create any size table, simply select the first two cells and drag the bottom right corner down to any number of rows you want. Given Excel’s limit of a million rows, this should cover you for most applications.

Once you have the first column, you can add columns for other ways of displaying date information. The following table shows a few of the more common expressions I have used to create additional columns.

<insert table here>

If you use a standard calendar, January 1 through December 31, the functions provided work well to calculate the names of months, days of the week, quarters, years, etc. However, if your organization uses a fiscal calendar, some of these calculations are not as easy. For example, suppose your organization uses a fiscal year that begins October 1 and goes through September 30^th. The calculation for month number is not as simple as using the MONTH() function. Nor is the calculation of year simple either because the fiscal year for 2015 may in that case go from October 1, 2014 through September 30, 2015. So I thought you might like to see a few functions that could help you calculate fiscal columns in your data table.

Let’s start with the calculation of the fiscal year. Using the example date range above, how can I calculated the fiscal year from any given date. If I were to add 3 months to any date and then calculate the year using the YEAR() function, I would get the fiscal year. Why three months? Because there are three months in the prior calendar year. If my fiscal year started July 1, 2014 and went to June 30, 2015, I would add 6 months to the date before calculating the fiscal year using the YEAR() function. The following figure shows the column expression I need to create a CompanyFiscalYear column.

Calculating the year was not that difficult. However, calculating the month number of the fiscal year is a bit more complex. Why do I need a fiscal month number? Remember how I used the month number column as the sort by column for the month names so that the months appear in the correct order. I again have a similar problem when I am dealing with fiscal calendars. In the above example fiscal year beginning October 1, 2014, the order of the month names must be:

• October
• November
• December
• January
• February
• March
• April
• May
• June
• July
• August
• September

I can calculate the fiscal month number using the expression shown in the following figure. Note that it is a bit more complex than the expression to calculate the fiscal year. Where I’m using the number ‘9’, I’m really using ’12 – 3′ in which ’12’ is the number of months in the year and ‘3’ is the number of fiscal months in the first calendar year which in this case is October, November, and December. Therefore, if my fiscal calendar started in July, I would use ’12-6′ or ‘6’. A similar argument would explain why I need a ‘3’ at the end of argument for months in the second calendar year to increase the fiscal month number of these months appropriately. Again I would use a ‘6’ for a fiscal year starting in July because there are 6 months in the first calendar year that are part of the current fiscal year.

The final column I’m going to show today is the calculation of the fiscal quarter. In my October-September scenario, the first quarter of the fiscal year includes the months October, November, and December. Since I already have calculated fiscal month numbers, I can simplify my calculation of the quarter by simply dividing the fiscal month number by ‘3’ and rounding the result up to the next whole number if necessary using the ROUNDUP() function. Thus the following figure shows an easy calculation of the fiscal quarter.

That’s all for this time. I hope this helps you create useful date tables with not just traditional calendar dates and calculated fields, but also fiscal calendar fields that you can use in your pivot tables and reports.

C’ya next time.

Your Logical Data Model is not Normal

If you have been reading this blog over the last several years, you know that I have been a strong supporter of using PowerPivot and the Tabular model to perform data analysis, even for power users, not just DBAs. What you may not have realized is that I’ve been secretly teaching you a little about data modeling. What is data modeling? It is really nothing more than the collection of all the data in tables and the relationships between those tables in a database. Did you know that there are at least two major ‘types’ of data models when it comes to how your structure your data into tables? Each one serves a different purpose. Therefore, it can reasonably be argued that neither one is more correct than the other. But you need to understand when to use each type. That is what I want to discuss today.

Most DBAs and developers who work with databases like SQL Server, Oracle, and many common database are comfortable with the relational model for creating tables and defining the relationships that connect them. In fact, they immediately start to normalize a denomalized database in their heads within seconds of seeing the data schema. The relational model relies on the application of the rules of data normalization introduced by Edgar F. Codd in 1970. In essence, the goal of the rules of data normalization is to minimize the data redundancy which also has the effect of decreasing the overall size of the database while at the same time making it easier to maintain information that would otherwise be repeated through many records.

There are three primary rules that are used to determine whether a database, a collection of tables, has been normalized. These rules are:

First Normal Form: No two rows of data may contain repeating data or groups of data. Such repeating data must be split into a separate but connected table. For example, a sales order may contain the purchase of one or more items. Because the number of items included in a sales order is not predefined, it must be split into a separate table with one row for each item on the sales order. These two tables are then typically connected by an order id.

Second Normal Form: This rule only applies to tables which have a compound primary index, an index built from two or more fields. In this rule, all other fields in the table must depend on the entire compound index value, not only a portion of it. A possible example of this might be a table that includes students at a school in which the primary index combined the school name (or id) along with the student name (or id). Imagine that the table also included the address and phone number of the school. This information is not depended on the combination of the school and the student. It only depends on the school. Therefore, this violation of the second normal form requires that the data related only to the school be split into a second table that includes only school information.

Third Normal Form: This rule requires that every field not part of the primary index be depended on the primary index. Going back to my favorite Contoso database, one could argue that in the FactSales table, the Sales Amount field is redundant since this table also includes the sales quantity, sales price, and any sales discounts or returns. Why is it redundant? Because it can be calculated based on the other values of other columns in the record. Therefore, to fully achieve, third normal form, this field should be removed.

While there are other special case rules that can be applied to normalization of a database, most DBAs will be satisfied with a database that satisfies these three rules. They will then build the tables in their database corresponding to these rules and thus create the physical data model. It is called the physical data model because it defines the physical schema of the tables and the relationships between them.

However, business users of the data don’t look at the database that way. In fact most business users would be baffled by the large number of tables required and the relationships between them. In fact, they will not understand why they need to combine data from a half dozen to a dozen tables just to answer a single query question. As an example, let’s look at how a business user might think of just the products within the Contoso database.

The figure below shows the normalized data model for products and their subcategories and categories. As you can see from the schema, the only important piece of information in the subcategories table is the name of the subcategory. Similarly, the only important piece of information in the categories table is the name of the category.

Most business users would not think of category and subcategory names as part of separate tables, but as attributes of the product itself. In fact they would think of product information more like the following figure.

Imagine a database model with dozens of normalized tables and then try to envision how the typical business user sees the data with perhaps only a half dozen tables after denormalization.

In PowerPivot, we can address this issue in one of two ways. The first way would be to add the category and subcategory names to the product table in SQL Server before loading the data into PowerPivot. This would essentially make the physical data model the same as the logical data model used by the end-users. However, this data model would no longer be normalized.

Physically denomalizing the data tables is not the only solution. I could, as shown before in https://sharepointmike.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/power-pivot-hierarchies-part-2-of-powerpivot-2012-series/, build two calculated fields in the product table that use the RELATED() function to get the category and subcategory names and display them in the product table. I could then hide the two tables, dimCategory and dimSubcategory, from the user so that they would see a structure similar to their expected denormalized logical data model even though the data still is physically stored in a normalized structure.

The advantage of making the changes to the data model outside of PowerPivot is that it effectively reduces the amount of data that PowerPivot must store in memory thus potentially allowing a larger model to be created. The advantage of making the changes inside PowerPivot by using the RELATED() function and then hiding the technical tables that are still needed in the model but do not need to be seen by the client is that it preserves the sanity of those DBAs who cringe every time someone tries to their denormalize their data. Both methods will allow me to create similar Pivot tables in my Excel spreadsheet. Thus both methods can be considered correct.

The thing to remember is this. Data Normalization was developed to make data storage and maintenance easier and more efficient. However, data analysis and reporting often requires a fair amount of data denormalization. This is especially true when performing data analysis using reports, pivot tables and charts, and even third party data analysis tools. In fact, the logical view of the data schema aids in the performance of most data analysis. Just remember that your logical model is not a normalized model.

C’ya next time.

It’s Only the Role I’m Playing

This week I’m going to return to my favorite sample database, Contoso. If you remember, Contoso consists of sales data for a company that produces several different lines of customer electronics, from computers to phones to TVs. The data spans several years of sales. In past examples, I related the FactSales table (the table containing all of the sales records) to several tables including Channel (DimChannel), Date (DimDate), Product (DimProduct) and Product Sub-Category (DimProductSubCategory). In fact, the data source pre-defined these relations so that when I imported the data into my PowerPivot model in Excel, these relationships appeared by default as shown in the following figure.

Visually, I could switch to the Diagram view of the data model to see these relationships represented by solid lines connecting these five tables as shown below.

However, suppose I have additional information in my FactSales table. The DateKey field that I have used in the past identifies the sale date for each of the sales records. In the real world, there may be additional dates associated with each sale. For example, it is not hard to imagine that each sale would also have a Delivery Date and an Invoice Due Date. Now I might ask, does it make sense to report on sales based on the sale date or does it make more sense to report on sales based on the invoice due date or even the date of payment. Well, you might say, ‘That depends on who is asking the question.’ Very true. My Marketing/Sales manager might want to see sales by the sales date. He or she does not care about when the invoice is paid off. They just need to know if they hit their sales quotas for each month. Therefore, they might need a report that uses the default relationship and looks something like the following:

On the other hand, the Chief Financial Officer is not as concerned about when the sale took place, but when the invoice for the sale is due because only then is the income truly realized for the company. Thus the above report does not meet their needs.

Now suppose that I had a few additional columns, as mentioned earlier, that told me some other dates such as when the items were delivered and/or when the invoice for the sale was due. Let’s further suppose that these columns exist in the FactSales table and might appear like the following figure.

With these columns in my FactSales table, I would want to create relations between them and my date table (DimDate) so that I could generate reports using them. The following figure shows the Create Relationship screen in which I define a new relationship between the delivery date (DeliveryDate) column in FactSales and the date (DateKey) column in DimDate. When I click the Create button, the Power Pivot engine creates a second relationship between these two tables. (Remember the first relationship was between the sales date (Datekey) column in FactSales and the (Datekey) column in DimDate.

In a similar fashion, I create a third relation between these two tables to connect the invoice due date (InvDue) column in FactSales and the date (Datekey) column in DimDate. For the purposes of this demo, I am going to stop there. However, I could create additional relationships between any other date fields in the FactSales table and the date (DateKey) column in DimDate. Switching to the Diagram view, I could now see something like the following between these two tables.

Notice that there are three lines between FactSales and DimDate. One of these lines is solid and the other two lines are dashed. You can only have one active relationship between any two tables. That active relationship is represented by the solid line. The other two relations are inactive at the moment. These three relationships are collectively called role playing relations and DimDate is a role playing dimension because only one relation at a time can be active from the DimDate dimension. Think of it this way, the date column (DateKey) in DimDate can play one of three different roles. It can either play the part of the sales date, the delivery date, or the Invoice date. However, it can only play one role at a time. Unless all three dates were exactly the same, I have to choose which role I want DateKey in DimDate to play with the FactSales table by selecting one of the relationships.

The initial data import associate the DateKey column in DimDate to the DateKey value in FactSales which represented the date the item was sold. As long as the report requested wants to allocate sales to the sales date, I need to do nothing other than generate the Pivot Table report as shown below.

However, if I now have to generate a report for my CFO, I would have to go into the model and change the role that DateKey in DimDate plays. I might try to simply right click on the dashed line representing the connection between the DateKey in DimDate with the InvDue column in FactSales and select: Mark as Active.

This action would generate the following error message.

The problem is clearly stated. You can only have a single active relationship between the two referenced tables. Therefore, I must first right click on the current active relationship to deactivate it before activating a different relationship between the two tables.

Once the original relationship is deactivated, I can go back and activate the new relationship between DateKey and InvDue.

Knowing that only one role (relationship) can be active at a time, I am a little surprised that Microsoft did not automatically deactivate the original relationship when a new one is set active. However, like many things, they did not ask me. Plus they may have had other reasons for not automatically deactivating the current relationship. In any case, after making this change and returning to my pivot table (without making any changes to the pivot table itself), the data automatically updates using the new relationship to show the sum of sales by month of the invoice due date rather than the sales date.

If you examine the sales totals for either the years or individual months, you can quickly see that this role change for the DimDate dimension makes a significant change in the sales numbers reported each month.

That’s all for this week. I hope that now you have a better idea how you can use a single dimension to play different roles. (You could also have added the DimDate table three times to the model, once for each date column in FactSales so that each instance of the DimDate table could have a single relationship to FactSales. Then by changing which dimension you select to display in the Pivot Table, you can achieve essentially the same result. This may be easier for the end-user who does not have access to the data model to make the changes listed above. However, your power-users may prefer a simpler model with fewer tables and can change the role played by those dimensions as needed.)

C’ya next time.

Breaking Symmetry in Reports

Symmetry in reports refers to those reports in which more than one measure is reported on for each combination of horizontal and/or vertical dimensions. Using the Contoso data set, suppose I wanted to display the Sales Amount and the Return Amount for each year broken down by the sales channel. I might set up my pivot table definition as shown in the following figure.

This definition would result in a pivot table that would look something like the following:

This pivot table shows me the return amount and the sales amount for each year in the database along with a total for each of these fields summed across all three years. But what if my management did not want all of that information. What if they only wanted to see the annual sales amounts for all three years and the returns for only the most recent year. In other words, they do not want to see the totals across all three years and they do not want to see the return amounts for 2007 or 2008. This means I need to remove the columns marked in the following image.

Let’s first look at the total columns on the right of the table. These are actually quite easy to remvoe because Excel provides within the PivotTable Tools Design ribbon the ability to select which subtotals and which grand totals to include or remove. To accomplish this, I can begin by clicking anywhere within the pivot table and selecting the Design ribbon as shown in the following image.

In the Layout group on the left side of the ribbon, I can use the dropdown for Subtotals and Grand Totals to customize which totals to include in my report. In this case, I want to remove the grand totals for the rows while retaining the grand totals for the columns. I can do this by selecting the option: On for Columns Only.

Selecting this option immediately removes the two rightmost columns. However, I still need to remove two of the three return amount columns for the years 2007 and 2008.

My first thought might be to simply hide the columns. However, the problem with this method is that it is somewhat obvious that a column is hidden by looking at the letters defining the columns (where is column C?) and someone could easily unhide these columns. Also, in this case, hiding the column also removes the year headers and in the case of the first column, the column label, both of which are undesirable consequences of hiding columns.

A better method is to define a set that only includes the columns I want to keep. Sets can be created for many purposes related to limiting the columns or rows displayed in a table. In this case, I can easily define a set that excludes the columns for the Return Amount values for both 2007 and 2008 while leaving the Return Amount in 2009. To create a Set, select the Analyze ribbon in the PivotTable Tools group as shown in the following image.

From the Fields, Items, & Sets dropdown, I select the option to create a set based on columns since I want to select which columns appear in the resulting table. If, on the other hand, I wanted to limit which channels appeared, I could create a set based on the row items.

In the dialog that appears, you see a row for each of the columns in the current pivot table. To remove a row, simply click to the left of the row to select the row and then click the Delete Row button. Don’t confuse the terminology here. Delete Row refers to the row selected in the dialog and has nothing to do with rows in the pivot table. Also, I recommend that you provide a meaningful name for the set rather than Set1, Set2, etc. so that you can easily tell what each set does simply by reading the set name.

Using this technique, I can remove the rows that calculate the Return Amount for the years 2007 and 2008 as shown in the figure below. Note however, that I can also add rows to the pivot table definition (which would appear as columns because I am defining a set based on columns). In the first column, I can include the year for the data and in the second column I can select from the dropdown any numeric value in the pivot table fields to be displayed. Note that I can also create copies of rows (columns in the table) and I can rearrange the order of the rows (columns in the table). You can create multiple data sets with different combinations of rows (columns).

This capability exists in PowerPivot tables, not in standard Excel Pivot tables.

After clicking the OK button, my pivot table now looks like the one shown below (after some additional cleanup). In this table, the first two years display a single value, the sales amount. For the last year, the table displays two values, return amount and sales amount. Tables which do not have the same values within each column grouping are officially referred to as Asymmetric Reports as opposed to Symmetric Reports which have the same measures displayed within each of the column groupings.

Hope you found this useful. C’ya next time.

Show Report Filter Pages

One of the interesting things to see when working with Pivot tables is to look at the differences between regular pivot tables that Excel has been able to create since about 1997 with Excel 97 (actually Excel 5 in1993 had basic pivot table functionality, but no wizard yet) and Power Pivot tables which has been a relatively recent addition (Excel 2010 with an add-in). Standard pivot table functionality still exists in Excel 2013 and serves as an alternatively tool for simple pivot tables that only require a single data source and less than a million rows of data.

In regular pivot tables, you might want to create a pivot table and use one of the dimensions as a filter. In the following example, I use a version of the FactSales table ripped from Contoso and I load it directly into Excel as one of the worksheets. Then I click on the Pivot Table command from the Insert ribbon to create a basic pivot table.

I added the Sales Amount field to my Values area. Being a numeric value, Sales Amount makes a good choice as a measure for a pivot table. I then added the dimensions for store and product as my horizontal and vertical dimensions generating a reasonable pivot table. However, I also added channel as the filter.

By default, after adding a filter, the pivot table still displays all values for the filter in the table. However, by using the dropdown, I can view the pivot table with one or more of the filter values at a time.

With only four possible values, it would not seem to be a big deal to view each of the channels one at a time. However, Excel provides another way to display the pivot table showing the pivot table on a series of pages with each page representing a different filter value. To do this, I can go to the PivotTable Tools menu group and select the Analyze ribbon. Then select Show Report Filter Pages… from the Options dropdown menu as shown in the image below.

When I select this option, Excel displays a dialog that let me pick the filter I want to expand. In this case, I only have a single filter on the Channel field so I select that filter and click the OK button.

Excel then generates a separate worksheet for each of the filter values and labels the worksheet tab with the filter value so you can easily click on a table to view the pivot table with the selected filter value applied.

This option makes it easier to go back and forth between views of the pivot table with different filter values applied. If you give a copy of the workbook to someone who might not be as familiar with pivot tables as you are, you can expand out the pivot table by the filter values and then lock the workbook so they cannot accidentally make changes to it. It also makes it easier to simply print a series of the pages to your printer if hardcopy is necessary.

So using the same data, I attempted to add the original data to the Power Pivot Data Model by using the Add to Data Model option in the PowerPivot ribbon

I then defined a Pivot Table from the data model using the same fields as before. When I then opened the Options dropdown menu from the Analyze ribbon of the PivotTable Tools group as I did before, I was surprised by the fact that the option to Show Report Filter Pages was greyed out as you can see below.

Apparently, this option is not available when displaying the data through the Power Pivot model, but is available from the basic Pivot table model. I’m sure there is a way to brute force some code to expand each filter value into a table in a new worksheet and rename that worksheet appropriately, but that kind of defeats the purpose of creating a “BI Tool for the Masses” which is the goal of most of my Pivot Table blogs.

C’ya next time.

The Role of Role Playing Dimensions

Perhaps you have heard the term Role Playing Dimension in regards to PowerPivot and/or Analysis Services cubes. This terms refers to the ability of one dimension to be linked to more than one fact in the fact table. Now strictly speaking, there is still only a single primary link between the dimension and the fact table and that link is used as the default link when aggregating data by that dimension. However, some dimensions, such as date dimension, often can be used against multiple fields in the fact table. For my example, I will use the Adventure Works DW data set that I use in many of my SQL Saturday presentations since it represents a typical sales database. Another good sample database is the Contoso dataset. Using the reseller sales table as my fact table (FactResellerSales), I can proceed to pull into my Excel PowerPivot table this fact table along with the dimensions for Product, Product Category, Product SubCategory, and Date. Notice that there is at least one relationship between each table and one other. This primary relationship is represented by a solid line in the figure below. However, there are three relationships between the FactResellerSales table and the DimDate table. One of the relationships is represented by a solid line and the other two are represented by dotted lines. Back in the source database, these three relationships are represented by regular indexes between these two tables. There is no indication to define which relationship is more important than the other. So how does PowerPivot select which one is the primary relationship between the two tables? The best I can figure out is that it is based on the order of the three different date keys in the fact table. In this case the OrderDateKey appears first and is therefore selected as the primary or Active relationship.

Looking at the raw sales data for a moment, I can see that the dates in the OrderDateKey, DueDateKey, and ShipDateKey are different with the order date occurring first followed by the due date and then the ship date. This would make sense in the real world. Unfortunately, if I did not have the ability to use role playing dimensions for each of these dates, I would either have to deal with only a single relationship between the date dimension table and one of these dates such as the order date or have multiple date dimension tables, one for each relationship. If I only used a single date dimension table, I would have to pick one date in my sales table to relate that dimension. Then any sum I calculated such as the sum of the order amounts, the sum of the ship amounts, or the sum of the due amounts would be associated with a single date such as the order date even though the due date may not occur until the next month or even next year. Unfortunately, this sample data does not show many such cases. However, I will show you one case at the end of the blog.

Our pivot table would then look something like this:

However, that would not be correct since we did not ship the items on the same day as the order nor was the amount due on the same day as the order. Therefore, we need another way to relate these two table when performing a summing calculation. That other way includes the use of the USERRELATIONSHIP() function which lets us define for the purposes of a single calculation which relationship we want to use. For example, to calculate the sum of the amounts ordered, we can sum the Sales Amount field by the OrderDateKey field as shown in the following equation:

When placed in our measure area of the FactResellerSales table, I can see that this calculation returns a value of over 80 million. (I will format as currency this in a moment.)

Similarly, the Shipped Amount can be calculated by summing the Sales Amount using the ShipDateKey as shown in this equation:

Finally the Due Amount can be calculated with the following equation using the DueDateKey field.

After formatting the measures as currency (which saves me time by not having to format this data in the resulting pivot tables separately), the measures appear as this:

Now I can proceed to build the pivot table by clicking on the PivotTable button in the Home ribbon and then selecting

PivotTable from the dropdown.

Excel prompts me to create the PivotTable in either a new worksheet or an existing worksheet. I will select a new worksheet here.

After clicking OK, Excel creates my empty PivotTable and opens the Field List to let me begin defining my PivotTable.

I choose a very simple layout with my calculated measures going across the top of the table and a hierarchy of time coming down the rows of the table.

By default when displaying the names of the months, Excel displays them alphabetically. Typically this will not please your manager. Therefore using a technique I discussed in an earlier blog, I define a column that contains the month number as the column by which I want to sort the column names.

Keep in mind that you only have to do this once. All subsequent PivotTables and PivotCharts will use the sort order assigned to the column EnglishMonthName without my having to do anything else.

Now the months appear in the correct order.

But more importantly for this demonstration, if I drill down into any of the months, I will see the sum of the order amounts, shipped amounts, and due amounts correctly summed by actual dates. Some positions will naturally be empty if there was no order, ship, or due activity for that day.

As promised, the following figure shows an example where orders were taken on two different days within the month but shipping and due dates only occurred once. The point being that the individual sums are correct for the days in which they appear.

Looking at the orders in April of the above figure, you may question the math saying that $2,204,542 plus $82 is $2,204,624, not $2,204,623. This is the result of rounding each individual amounts to whole dollars and is not an indication that Excel cannot perform math. All sums are calculated on the actual dollar amounts and then rounded.

So this is one simple example of how to use role playing dimensions. Dimensions other than dates can serve as role playing dimensions, but most people will encounter the need for role players when working with dates.

C’ya next time.

Some Additional Word Comments

Last week I showed you how to use a Word template as a form in a SharePoint library. I kept the form fairly basic, and did not have the time to cover some additional considerations when choosing to use Word to create your forms. This week I will cover a few of those considerations.

The first consideration is that since form text is stored in SharePoint lists, SharePoint 2013 does not support standard text columns of more than 255 characters by default. Sure you can use a single line of text data type or a multiple line of text, both of which default to 255 characters. At first I was surprised by this since I expected the multiple lines of text to automatically support substantially more text than 255 characters because by default, SharePoint 2010 does.

Therefore, when I created the SharePoint metadata in the library where the form would reside, I created the Lesson Learned Description as a multi-line text data type. Granted, I did not read the 2013 properties carefully because I fully expected that I would be able to store long detailed descriptions in that column. After I added the column to the Word form and saved the Word template back to the library, I created my first form record as shown in the following figure.

After entering the data I wanted into the form, I tried to save the data back to the data store, which in this case consists of the metadata columns in the SharePoint document library where I modified the form template. Notice that the value for the Lesson Learned Description column has a dotted red line around it. This means that there is an error with the value. There is nothing to indicate what the error is. However, since the column is a text field, there are very few things that can cause an error. The most likely cause for the error, and in this case the correct cause, is that the value supplied is larger (in total characters) than the program can save back to the data store.

To test this theory, I deleted a few characters from the description and tried to resave the form data. This time, as you can see in the following image, the save succeeded.

But wait just a second, this problem is even easier to solve. Just go back to the library settings and open the column settings for the multi-line column. By default this data type limits values to 255 characters or less. (No it really does not say that.) However, look for the Allow unlimited length in document libraries setting and change the selection to Yes. While you cannot specify an absolute column length in characters, you do have the ability to allow the column to accept as much data as you want to throw at it.  (Note, this was done in SharePoint 2013.  SharePoint 2010 by default allows multi-line text to be larger than 255 characters.)

However, some of the other column types present more of a problem. For example, it is not possible to surface a hyperlink field from SharePoint in a Word form. Perhaps this is because a hyperlink field actually consists of two values, the hyperlink itself and a description. You also cannot display in the form a multi-selection choice or lookup column. While these fields may appear in the Document Properties panel as shown in the following figure, I have had problems saving the result back to the SharePoint library even if the column in the library is defined as a multi-value choice field (or lookup field).

When attempting to define a multiple value choice data type, I do get the following message when creating the column.

Returning to the question of saving the data, let me show you what happens when you save the form. Unlike InfoPath which just saves an XML file containing the data. The XML definition of the form is saved separately and only once. While this greatly reduces the number of bytes saved with each instance of the form added to the library, it does limit your ability to make changes to the form fields without creating a new content type each time. On the other hand, since the entire Word form including the values are saved with each instance of the form in the library just like any other Word document, it is a simple matter to change the template to add, delete, or change any of the columns on the form. All new forms will use the new template when you create new documents. Furthermore, you can still open the old form instances since they are nothing more than regular .DOCX or .DOC files depending on the form template from which you started.

The following figure shows the first part of the Save As dialog in which I can select where I want to save the completed form. By default, the Current Folder points to the SharePoint library where the Word template has been saved. However, there is nothing to stop me from saving the document in a local drive or network drive. (I can also click on SharePoint to the left of this figure which should also show the current folder at the top of the list on the right.)

If I select the Current Folder, Word opens the Save As dialog as it usually does, but notice in the right panel that the default location points to the SharePoint library. Also note that the form is saved as a regular .docx file. The File Name defaults to XXX.docx where XXX is the first line of text in the template. You will probably want to change this as I have in the following figure. Note however that even here I can select any other location where I have permissions to save files including SkyDrive, Google Drive and other locations.

The last thing I want to point out before ending this week is that when you display the contents of the library, text strings, no matter how long their values may be, do not get any preference during display over columns that have smaller values (in terms of characters). In fact, as the number of columns that SharePoint attempts to display increases, the widths of the columns appear to be controlled more by the name of the column than the data included within the column as shown in the following figure.

If this is a problem because you need to display the data in a report, the easiest solution is to export the data to Excel. Just click on the Export to Excel button in the Connect & Export group of the Library ribbon of the library.

A dialog appears that prompts you whether you want to open the .iqy file or save it. Use the Save option only if you want to copy the file to open the Excel spreadsheet to a different computer.

Opening this file first opens Excel and then loads the data from the current library as shown in the following figure.

At this point, a few simple formatting adjustments to the columns in Excel including possibly the turning off of the grid lines, adding a style, removing some unnecessary columns and you have a presentable report.

Wait a second, what happened to the Lesson Learned Title? Remember that when you export data from a list or library to SharePoint, the export only includes the columns and rows you specify. In this case, the default view displayed the FileName so users could click on it to view the data in the form. However, you probably want to hide this field and display the Lesson Learned Title field. Note also that any filtering on rows carries through to the export. Even if you have your SharePoint view set up to only display pages of 30 rows at a time, export ignores this functionality and exports all rows that match the filter criteria, not just the first 30.

To take this example one step further, you can copy and paste the final Excel spreadsheet into a Word document if it is relatively small. Of course, you could also use Reporting Services to generate a report from the SharePoint library or even use Report Builder with the Excel spreadsheet to create multi-page reports.

Well, that’s it for this time. C’ya next week maybe. I’ll be at the SQL Saturday in Tampa, FL (http://www.sqlsaturday.com/273/eventhome.aspx ). If you are in the neighborhood, stop by to say, ‘Hi!’ I’ll be presenting in the afternoon on building cubes with either PowerPivot or Analysis Services Tabular model (I haven’t decided which way I’ll go yet.)