Information Presentation Basics
- 3 minutes to read
Using the ExpressPivotGrid, you can turn a large amount of data into a compact report with easily manageable results nicely fitting the control’s view.
But what makes it the powerful tool is that you can perform a visual modeling of the report’s structure by manually rearranging fields across different areas or within a particular zone or by hiding them in the customization form. Dragging a field or a group of fields around in the view will result in changing a report on the fly.
You can quickly change orientation of the field from column to row, line up fields in a particular header area, so the values of those fields are arranged in the related area into a hierarchical tree. Thus the logically related data can be organized by categories. Having that tree in your report, you can drill down and up data at different levels. As a result, you perform a deeper data analysis or avoid unnecessary details.
Subtotaling is another way of arranging and summarizing data.
To narrow down the report’s results, you can use filters. Filters can be applied at three levels. First, you can use the prefilter panel. This will affect the entire report. Second, you can drop field onto the filter header area and uncheck values in the field’s drop-down list to be filtered out. This will affect the entire report too. Third, you can filter values of the fields located in areas other than the filter header area areas. Only the unselected items of those fields will be hidden in the view but not involved into the calculations.
The ExpressPivotGrid is capable of working with the data layer of any type. It supports OLAP mode and three data loading modes allowing you to choose the layer that is the most suitable for solving the current data analysis tasks. The brilliant feature of the ExpressPivotGrid is that it’s organized in the best way to perform a robust data analysis on the multilayered data (a hierarchical tree of tables that have a master-detail relationship). You can create additional non-table calculated fields in the data source containing the summarized results of the data, which come from different tables and are pre-processed with the specified calculations. These results will be then shown in the view and involved into the further calculations in the reports.
For details on multilayered data processing, please refer to the bound mode topic and the OrderReportsDemo that ships with the ExpressPivotGrid Suite. The presented demo uses lookup and calculated fields to provide the basic multidimensional analysis on that data.
Compared to the traditional grid control, the pivot grid requires far less time and efforts in providing solutions to the above tasks.