One of the cool things with SAS OLAP Viewer in Add-in to Microsoft Office is your ability to skip right into a specific value. Out of the box, viewing OLAP cubes can lead you to believe that in order to view a specific value you need to click-thru a hierarchy & choose Isolate from the menu to only view that single value. But what do you do if the value is hard to locate in the dimension? What if you want to Isolate more than one value in the report?
Fortunately, the Edit View interface provides search functionality which allows you to choose one or multiple results to quickly get the report you so desire.
Don't believe me? Well, here are the steps.
- Open an OLAP Cube in SAS OLAP Viewer
- Right click and choose Edit View -> Edit with View Editor
- Choose the Search tab
- Modify the search criteria (options include contain, start with, end with, match pattern, blank, etc)
- Type in a value to search (such as Chocolate, my favorite)
- Choose the Dimension to search within
- Click the Search button
- Highlight the value(s) which you would like to view
- Choose the arrow to move values into the Columns, Rows, or as a Slicer
- Select Ok
Now the resulting screen shows only the 4 chocolate candies I had chosen in the search.
And a quick tip about searching - it's not an automatic filter. In my example, if I already had all of the products listed in the report than my search would either not work (saying it was already in the view) or it would duplicate the result (depending on what level in the hierarchy the value I selected in step 8 above). Therefore, before you begin using the Edit View Search GUI I would recommend setting the current view at the top level.
Note: I did all of this with SAS Add-in to MS Office 4.3, accessing a SAS 9.2 environment.
