Three Ways of Working With OLAP Data

In this section:

There are three ways to work with OLAP data, from the report itself, from the Selections panel, and from the OLAP Control Panel. This documentation is organized to help you understand what you can do from each location and which method is most suitable and efficient for your particular OLAP settings.


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The Report

You can perform a wide range of basic analytic functions from the report itself. Changes you make in the report are implemented instantly. Every OLAP user can perform these tasks:

For an illustration of report-powered OLAP analysis, see We Do It Every Day: A Typical Web Query.


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Selections Panel

When the OLAP Selections panel is turned on, you can quickly limit the data in the report by selecting specific values for the dimensions in the hierarchy. A drop-down list is available for each dimension. You can multiselect values from one or more dimension lists to refine your report output.

If you wish to add a dimension element to the report, you can drag it from the Selections panel into the report frame. (The cursor changes to a plus sign (+) to indicate an acceptable location.)

Each dimension has a relational operator button located to its left. This button toggles through a selection of basic numeric operators that enable you to quickly define your selection criteria. The operators are:

For details, see Selection Criteria Relational Operators.

The following image shows the Equal to operator as the selection for each dimension in the Selections panel.

OLAP Selections Pane

The name of the dimension field appears as defined in the Master File, even if an alternate column title has been specified.

In addition, you can customize the display of the measures in your report from the Selections panel. You can click either the Measures or the Graph arrow in the upper-left corner of the pane to list the measures.

Note that the Selections panel is resizable. The controls for dimensions, measures, and graphs float as you resize the report window, so that they continue to be visible in the frame.

Five buttons appear below the Selections panel: OLAP, Run, Reset, Save, and Help.


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OLAP Control Panel

From the OLAP Control Panel, you can perform every analytic function available to a WebFOCUS OLAP user, as shown in the following image.

WebFOCUS OLAP Control Panel

The main window of the OLAP Control Panel contains the following components:

Although the most frequently used functions are available directly from an OLAP report and/or from the Selections panel, several can only be performed from the OLAP Control Panel.

OLAP Control Panel operations include:


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