Drill Down

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With drill down, you are looking for lower levels of detail within an existing hierarchy. In the following example, you will use Explorer to understand which specific wines have higher prices and ratings. In looking at Figure 19-1, start at the second level, Color, from the Varietal hierarchy and the top level, Country, in the Producer hierarchy. Additional columns of data such as Dryness, Type, Vintage, Varietal, Producer, Label Name exist in the microcube but are not displayed in the initial report. The business question is: Wine ratings and prices vary by color and country; do they vary as much or more for particular varietals?

1. To begin drill down, first select the object that you want to drill into, either the table, crosstab, or chart. This first step simply enables drill mode. It doesn’t matter where in the table you position the mouse.

   

2. Click the Drill button from the toolbar, or select Analysis | Drill from the pull-down menu. If you have not first selected the object you want to drill into, the cursor becomes a drill icon or magnifying glass with a question mark. Click on the table.  

   Note 

   If the Drill button does not appear on your toolbar, you may need to ask the BusinessObjects Supervisor to include it in your profile, or your company may not have purchased this software module.

3. BusinessObjects inserts another report tab, naming it Report (1), where Report is the name of the first report tab (assuming this Drill option is enabled via Tools | Options). In the next screen, I have not changed the default report name, so Report (1) appears with a drill icon to indicate Report (1) is in Drill mode. If your Drill options are set to Add A Sum On Measures, BusinessObjects adds a sum row to the end of the table. For ratings and prices, a sum is nonsensical and should be removed. If the initial report includes other Calculations, such as Average, then these are also added to the report.

   Caution 

   The report totals are based on data displayed, not on contents in the cube. For this reason, report averages in particular may appear misleading, as they are not genuine averages for the entire data set. If you are not satisfied with the totals as they appear, refer to Chapter 18, “Calculation Contexts and Extended Syntax,” for ways to correct them.

   

4. Once in Drill mode, position your mouse in the column and cell value that you wish to move to the next level of detail. As shown in Figure 19-1, to move from the Color to Varietal, position the mouse over any cell that contains a Color value. If you want to see only Red varietals, position the mouse over Red; if you want to see only White varietals, position the mouse over White. The tooltip tells us that the next drill level is Varietal. Double-click to drill down to the next level of detail.

   

5. BusinessObjects inserts the detail column into the report table and moves the drill selection to the toolbar. You can drag and drop the Drill toolbar to any place on the screen. By default, it appears with the other toolbars. From the Drill toolbar, you can use the drop-down box to filter the selection to All Colors, Red, or White only. Move to block will insert the color indicator into the table. Remove will remove the filter and close the drill toolbar.

In step 1, you selected the table for drill down. Drilling within a chart works in a similar fashion, except that the next level of detail appears on the X axis. The next screen shows the results of drilling from Color to Varietal. Details by country do not appear in the chart, as they were not in the initial bar chart.

Drill down has helped uncover some interesting patterns. The initial summary report displayed some differences in average wine ratings by country but greater differences in prices. French Red wines are the most expensive. When you drill down, you see that it is the varietals Bordeaux Blend and Pinot Noir that are the most expensive, yet with lower average ratings than other varietals.

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