Step by Step - Getting Started Guide

Step 1 - Getting Ready for Pivoting

When it comes to preparing to use the pivot table, it’s important that you ensure that your data source is setup correctly to allow optimal analysis. Panorama’s pivot table for Google Docs supports two types of data sources:

Data from within a Google spreadsheet
Data from a local cube (.CUB) file

Data From Within Your Spreadsheet

The first step in creating your pivot table is to ensure that your spreadsheet is properly structured. When creating a pivot table, each column of your spreadsheet will become a field that can be used interactively in the pivot table. The names of the fields that will form in the pivot table will come from the column titles in your spreadsheet. Be sure that you have a name for each column across the first row of the spreadsheet in the source data.

There are two types of columns in a spreadsheet: Data Columns and Descriptive Columns. An example of a Data Column would be one that contains quantifiable values such as the number of items sold for a specific product or grades for a school course. An example of a Descriptive Column is one that would list the names of countries, sales agents or school courses.

Quick Tip: For best results, make sure that there are no empty columns or rows in your spreadsheet.

Local Cube File Data

Panorama’s solution for Google Docs offers enterprise users the ability to analyze data from their Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services platform. In order to get started, you first need to convert a cube into a “local cube file” called a CUB file. Cube files can contain an entire cube or just subsets of a full OLAP cube. With the new support for OLAP files, users can analyze corporate data, share and collaborate over fully interactive reports right from within Google Docs. To learn more about cube files go to http://www.panorama.com/google/ssas/.

There are three very good options that can be employed when creating a local cube file. It can be done from within SQL Server Analysis Services, Microsoft Excel and a powerful desktop application called CubeSlice.

CubeSlice is Panorama’s recommended tool for cube file creation as it optimizes the performance and the size of the file as well as provides the simplest user interface to create such files. Once you create your local cube file, ensure that it is located somewhere on your computer which is easy to recall as you will be prompted later to locate it.