Expand/Collapse (Business Objects)

This is the place where I store the things I tried once, found interesting and choose to forget again… to avoid loosing the info altogether, I write it down. Here is a perfect example of such a fact.

At a certain point, I was wondering what “expand” and “collapse” in the analysis menu were used for. I figured it out — but at the time I didn’t have this Blog yet — so I forgot all about it pretty soon after.

Let’s assume you have a table with Year and Average Revenue (which is a variable, calculated from “Sales Revenue” and “Quantity Sold”). Next, you enter drill-mode. You can now drill on the year and look at the quarter, to month etc… but what about the individual figures which were used to calculate the average revenue… well — there you go. Still in Drill Mode, you go to the Analysis menu and click “expand”.

Automatically, both measures are shown in colums next to the average Revenue. When you choose collapse, they disappear again.

Nifty little trick.

Couldn’t find this in the Core Reporting, the Intermediate or the Advanced Reporting courseware. But it is in the product-documentation — unlike some other stuff.