Example: Expand Report Elements for Ad-Hoc Analysis

Overview

You can expand and collapse parent elements to explore data within the context of a report.

Example: Expand an expense account to see which child account is causing a variance noted at the parent level. Collapse organization levels to see the rollup at the top or parent level of the hierarchy. 

Depending on whether you're expanding a row or column, child rows are added either below or to the left of the parent element by default. When you collapse, the child rows are removed.

See Explore Reports Using Ad Hoc Analysis.

Use Cases

Financial analysts can:

• Show the details of product revenue by its children to understand which product line is creating the variance.
• Explore the revenue by product and see which products are showing the highest gross margin over time. Next, they can filter the report by all the sales regions within the US level. 
• Present financial statements to the board and drill in and show where the numbers are coming from.

Analyst Example

You want to analyze a specific area of the model such as determine your expenses by level. You also want to explode the data by both expense and level. For each child operating expense, you get a row that shows the breakdown by each child level.

Your operating expenses include:

• Payroll
• Taxes & Benefits
• Office Expenses
• Travel & Entertainment
• Marketing
• Other Expenses

Your levels include:

• Company A (100 % owned)
• Company B (40 % owned)
• Company C (80% owned)
• Proposed Acquisition Company
• Total Company (only)

When you explode, you get a row for each child operating expense type for each child level.

Do the following:

1. Select a row.
2. Use the Ctrl key to select and apply a parent expense account and a parent level.
   Example: Select and apply 6000 Operating Expenses and Total Company.
3. To the columns, apply a time element such FY 2016 .
4. Select the row with the multiple parent elements applied. Right-click and select OfficeConnect > Expand.
5. In the Expand dialog, select to expand both Account and Level. Use the Shift key to select both.
6. Click OK.