Microstrategy Blog

I’ve been playing around with MicroStrategy 9 on my test box at home, and easily my favorite function, and the one that I see the most potential for, is Derived Elements.

A couple of quick tips. You can’t just make Derived Elements on any report…you have to create the report that you want the make the Derived Elements off of a predefined “Intelligent Cube”. Now I’m going to assume that if you’re looking into this as an option, I don’t have to walk you through babysteps, but of course, I’m willing to address any questions you might have in the comments, and if not me, MicroStrategy themselves is pretty good about picking up on what I miss.

So, step one. Create an Intelligent Cube. Make sure to include every attribute and metric in the cube that you might want to have access to. Once the cube is created (it’s essentially the same as creating a report, just without organizing the elements on a grid) right click on the new cube that you’ve created and set up when you want this cube to be created by selecting -> Schedule Delivery To -> Refresh Cube.

In the following screen, you can set the cube up to refresh based on any schedule that you’ve created via your Schedule Manager.

Now, create a new report, but instead of selecting “blank report” under the General Tab, select the option below.

One of the things that I like to do is track video game review scores online, because there’s plenty of attributes and hierarchies that just exist (genre, publisher, developer, etc), so it create for a pretty dynamic set. So here’s a report that I created using the new Intelligent Cube that I created.

But say I want to group what i consider “Next Gen” into it’s own category, and then have a category for everything else. Next Gen, as I’m defining it, is going to be PS3, and XBox 360, and group all others into “Other”. There’s also an “auto” group that basically means that anything you don’t select, is going to be it’s own item.

So, once these derived elements are created…what do you get?

Note how the attribute you made the derived elements from pretty much as the “consolidation” symbol over it now.

So here’s some other things you can do with this new found toy.

• Save the derived element for later use.
• Make calculations off of the elements you’ve created (A+B=C)
• Create Specific Filters for line items.
• Web Functionality almost exactly mimics Desktop functionality (where my screen caps are from).

Really, what this allows for is the ability for users to group data that is relevant, into ad-hoc groups depending on what their immediate needs may be. This allows for possible groupings of variance analysis categories against budget (imagine grouping one product under “low inventory”, and the other under “poor customer repsonse”, so that you can make dynamic analysis more relevant to “now” reasons).

Kudos to MicroStrategy for being able to internalize one of the main reasons that organizations have to export their data into external programs such as Excel…which to date, offered the easiest way for individual users to manipulate data to give it their own flavor and meaning.