Or, it could be as complex
as the customers with the largest contributions to gross profit margin over the past
four quarters, who have been customers for at least two years, and who have not
exceeded 80% of their existing credit line. The point is that once the business defines
the criteria for the top ten customers, a formula can be created that will always
calculate those top ten customers with the latest data; this allows the members of
the set to change frequently, depending on the criteria and the volatility of the data.
The person designing the reports can then simply drag over a named set such as Top
Ten Customers and the report will always show the current top ten customers. Once
again, Named Sets help highlight the need for someone who understands MDX well
when building a business intelligence solution based on Microsoft technology.
Figure 6-3 represents a rather boring chart on the surface. There is a single
measure, Gross Profit, on the X-axis. The Y-axis contains a hierarchy of product
model lines, a hierarchy that goes from the All level to the Product Line level to
the Model level. There is also a tooltip shown in the screenshot because, when the
mouse is moved over a bar, the value of that particular bar appears in a tooltip. In
this chart, there is one large bar, sometimes referred to as the Big Blue Bar because,
while boring on the surface, it actually tells users something useful: in this example
Gross Profit for all products is approximately $12.
Pages:
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203