Spotfire Ideas Portal
Currently when you have a hierarchy on either a cross-table OR a visualisation axes ie. Year->Month->Day or Country->State->town... you cannot drill through the Hierachy - only expand it to show EVERY single value across every level of the hierarchy with a slider... OR on a cross-tab ... you get every level whether you like it or not.
This doesn't work well for us. Here's a common example: If you have 4 years and you have Year-> Month->Week ... you end up with hundreds of values on the X-axis of a line chart (4 years x 12 months per year x 52 weeks split over 12 months)... the values are COMPLETELY unreadable.
You should add an option to "Drill-through" a hierarchy rather than expand all.
Basically when this option is selected it shows you the top level ie. Year . These labels act like hyperlinks - when you hover over them.. line appears underneath to indicate you can click it. If you click that label... it changes the Axes to show the month values BUT only the month values for the year you clicked on. If you then click on the month of Jan ... it shows you only the Week values for that month. This is true drill-down, something we don't believe Spotfire does natively at all currently.
If you add an up arrow to the end ot the axes (greyed out when at the top level) - this can be used to navigate back up to the previous level.
This functionality is present in SAS Visual Analytics and provides true drill-through.... its one of the better features of that otherwise cumbersome platform.
Cross-tabs should similarly allow this feature OR the option of a + symbol so that you don't have to have everything expanded.
An example of this - we have 73 Hospitals. Currently if we have every hospital in a cross-tab and their Emergency Department performance by Triage (1 to 5) then we end up with over 300 rows! Our users don't want to use cross-tabs as a result.
IF you added a drill-through function... then they only see the Hospitals... then the triage scores for that hospital and then you can drill through to an individual triage. This is alot more user-friendly, useful and true drill-through functionality.
Hello,
Thanks for reaching out and expressing your interest in this idea. I do not have a specific timeline to share for its implementation but I want to assure you that we are considering it.
In the meantime, I recommend exploring another approach. In Spotfire it is possible to zoom into visualization details by marking data. This functionality will enable to first mark data points within a visualization and then show all values across levels of a hierarchy by using the hierarchy slider on the axis selector. The marking can also be further refined as you switch between hierarchy levels. This documentation page will help setting this up.
Any update on this?
Any update on this being supported? Or at least some suggestion on workaround with ironpython?
Hello,
Any update on this when it will be available???
Thanks
Hello
Any news when all thoses needed evolution come?
Pleasssse
It´s possible to do that with Iron Python Script, but I agree that it would be a greateful achievement. If you want the script, send mail to rafael.espiritosanto@gmail.com
I agree, that this would be great functional improvement for drilling down large/deep hierarchies. I have just implemented similar with Filter to Marked and changing the hierarchy level with a control. With this in cross-tabs it would also deliver the 'accordion' style of cross-tab
here's an example of the Cross-table drill through. Check out the SAS VA demo Network Performance Report -> 'By Cell Technology' tab -> Cross tab down the bottom. Although the implementation looks terrible (the + and drill icons are tiny) ... the general functionality is great - expand OR drill cross tab axes... very neat and allows user to focus their attention. I think Spotfire could do this 10x better using this type of approach... tree maps also drill-through by clicking on a square, etc... Thanks again for considering.
Hiya Niklas - yep completely agree and very happy for you to make that change... and also the categories - sorry i screwed those up and put them under Ideas Portal. Here's a link if you'd like to see the drill-thru in action in a SAS demo. Just FYI - we evaluated 15 platforms on over 100 functional criteria and the only two thing SAS VA did better than spotfire was the in-visualisation drill-down (which is very useful) and a band plot confidence interval on forecasts rather than dotted line (looks prettier)... otherwise as with all platforms... Spotfire smashed its competition! SAS Demo link - check out tab 'Counter Party Analysis' and play with the Counter Party Bank X-axis ... imagine how cluttered it would look showing all values :)
Dave - I think I understand the request well enough, and I agree it would be useful. However, I think the name you gave the Idea is a little unspecific, and that it should rather be called something like "in-visualization drill down". Let me know if you agree and feel free to change the name of the Idea in that case?
yes - badly need drill-down on axes and tables
Just to add on when you try to sort the data the sorting feature completely ignores the hierarchy. There should be an option of sorting within the hierarchy.
Example if you had an hierarchy which went from state to city. Now suppose you expand/drill-down to the lowest hierarchy that is city .. if you were to sort the bars on the bar chart then it would completely ignore the states and just directly sort all cities in the country - there should be an option to sort cities within their respective states (which would be important especially with the drill-down capability)