Overview of PerformancePoint analytic charts and grids

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Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise

By using PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer, you can create analytic reports for your dashboards. Analytic reports are dynamic, visual representations of data that can be displayed as interactive line charts, bar charts, pie charts, and tables (which are called grids).

In a dashboard, analytic reports can resemble those shown in the following image:

PerformancePoint analytic reports

PerformancePoint analytic reports remain connected to the data, which means that their content is always up to date. To learn how to create an analytic report, see Create an analytic chart or grid by using Dashboard Designer.

Interactive functionality in analytic charts and grids

You would typically include one or more analytic reports in your dashboard to enable dashboard users to easily view and explore data. Depending on how you set up your analytic charts or grids, dashboard users can use those reports to follow these steps:

  • Open a Decomposition Tree to see how a specific value can be broken down into its contributing members and discover trends across individual members.

    Important

    You must have Microsoft Silverlight 2 or Microsoft Silverlight 3 installed on your computer in order to use the Decomposition Tree. If you do not have Silverlight 2 or Silverlight 3 installed, you will not see Decomposition Tree listed on the right-click menu.

  • Apply value filters to display the top (or bottom) members in a group, or values that are in a given range.

  • Use Additional Actions, which are defined in the Analysis Services cube.

  • Sort values or chart legend items in ascending or descending order.

  • Drill down or up to see lower or higher levels of detail.

  • Filter out empty items, isolate an item, or remove an item from the report view.

  • Pivot the report, or configure the view type and format.

  • Show or hide information, such as measures or background information.

  • Work with multiple pages of data. (This is useful when a query returns a large set of results.)

  • Export information to Microsoft PowerPoint or Microsoft Excel.

Tip

The activities described in the list are largely dependent on the way that data cubes are configured in SQL Server Analysis Services. For example, if no actions are defined in the data cubes, then the Additional Actions option is not available for your analytic chart.

Data sources for analytic charts and grids

Analytic reports pull information from data that is arranged into cubes in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services or SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services. These cubes consist of dimensions, members, and named sets, as described here:

Item Description

Dimension

A structured, hierarchical way to organize data. For example, a Products dimension might have a hierarchy such as Products > Product Categories > Product Names, and a Date dimension might have Year > Week > Day.

Measure

A cube member that associates a numeric value with one or more dimension members. For example, some measures might include Sales Amounts, Gross Profit, and Gross Profit Margin.

Named set

A collection of one or more dimension members that is defined in the database. For example, Core Products is a common named set that contains a subset of the members that are included in the Products dimension.

See Also

Concepts

Create an analytic chart or grid by using Dashboard Designer