Analytic charts & grids in PerformancePoint Services

Analytic charts & grids are interactive visualizations rendered by PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint 2010. They let users drill down, across, and through any hierarchy in the model: hook it up to an Analysis Services database or PowerPivot model, define the initial layout, and you’re done. There’s nothing more to do to enable this interactivity.

Here’s an analytic chart in a SharePoint dashboard… what happened on the 11th?

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The chart shows its true colors when you use the context (right-click) menu; to learn more about the 11th we might right-click then drill into Flight or Destination. We could also use Decomposition Tree or drill down to the tabular source data using “Show Details”.

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Analytic charts & grids are always exportable to Excel or PowerPoint for re-modeling or presentation.

What’s new in SharePoint 2010?

Comparing additional measures: In the analytic chart above, we might wonder about different types of delay. The new “Select Measures…” option lets us bring in additional measures from the model to augment or replace the current measure.

Here we’ve added a few specific delay type measures, and are removing the original measure “Arrival Delay”:

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Turning on simple inline filters: The new “Value” and “Top 10” filters support simple scenarios such as “show only hospitals in the top 20% in terms of number of unoccupied beds” and “show only homes with gas bills over $500 in December.” These are in addition to “non-empty” and show/hide item filters.

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Working with the chart’s bottom axis: Most elements in analytic charts are clickable; the only elements that weren’t clickable in PerformancePoint Server 2007 were those on the bottom axis. Now these labels are clickable too.

Comparing values angularly: Regardless of the dangers of pie charts, now possible to switch to this popular kind of chart. (Keep in mind you can always switch to 100% stacked bar or any of the other chart types.)

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The improvements discussed so far are accessible in SharePoint dashboards, but enable dashboard designers too, as you create reports using the dashboard-user features right in Dashboard Designer.

Here are a few additional new things for dashboard designers:

Delivering interactive reports doesn’t require deploying a dashboard or even configuring web parts: Analytic charts & grids, as well as scorecards and strategy maps, are directly accessible from the SharePoint list they’re stored in. On any PerformancePoint Content list view, select a report and choose “View Report.”

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You can use SharePoint list views to build the “briefing book” you want your users to see. (For example, you might add a filter to the list view to show only reports with a particular tag.)

Using conditional formatting defined in the model: If you’re using an Analysis Services model that contains rules for cell coloring or fonts, that formatting is honored by analytic grids. This is on by default; you’ll find the checkbox to turn it off under Edit > View > Settings within Dashboard Designer.

Overriding model measure formatting: Though we recommend default formats defined in model, for cases where you can’t touch the model, or you need different format for specific reporting (for example to shorten “2,113,535.35” to “2.1M”, you can now override format per-measure. In the analytic grid, select a cell then select one of the format buttons from the Edit ribbon, or Edit > Format Numbers. In an analytic chart just use the Edit > Format Numbers dialog

Wade Dorrell, Program Manager