Use Groups to Create Categories

You can combine several dimension members into a single member using groups. For example, if you are working with a field that contains thousands of products, you can use groups to combine those products into higher level categories. Grouping data is also really useful for cleaning up data inconsitencies. For example, your data may have California listed as CA, California, and Calif. When you try to see all sales in California your numbers will be split across these three rows. You can quickly group these three variants together to treat them as a single value.

The view below shows the number of students enrolled in each major at a small college. The data doesn't have any sort of categorization of majors into departments.

You can use groups to categorize these majors into departments so you can start asking questions at that level of detail.

Step 1

Select several majors from one department and click the Group icon (paper clip) on the toolbar. The values are grouped onto a single row and a new "Group" field is added to the Data window.

Step 2

You can further modify the group (and add more departments) by right-clicking the group field in the Data window and selecting Edit.

Step 3

In the Edit Group dialog box, you can change the name of the grouped field. In this example, the field is named Department.

Step 4

Select the members that you want to group and click Group.

Note: There are several different ways to find and select members in the Groups dialog box. To learn more about using the Groups dialog box, search for Groups in the online help.

Step 5

Rename grouped fields by selecting the group and then clicking the Rename button. Type a new name and press Enter on your keyboard.

Step 6

When finished, click OK.

The view below now shows enrollment by department.