Filtering Data in Stories

Use story filters to narrow the scope of your analysis. Story filters allow you to apply filters for all charts in a story that are based on the same model. They are used for specific dimensions or measures and can apply to all components of a story.

While defining a widget in the Builder panel, you can pre-filter the data that the widget displays in the Filter area.

A data source for a chart or table may prompt you to select dimension members before data can be displayed. If the data source you select to create a chart or table has prompts or variables to be set, a prompt will appear when you create the first chart or table that uses the data source. After the responses to the prompts/variables are set, the information you provide will be used by all tables and charts that use the same data source.

Input controls are page filters that allow story viewers to filter data, compare figures, and explore relationships directly from a story page. When selecting All in an input control, only dimension members that have values in the underlying model are selected, or Booked members. Unbooked members (members that have no measure values associated with them) are not displayed. In other words, All does not necessarily select all possible dimension members.

It is also possible to use an input control to exclude members from the data analysis. When the user selects a member, its value will not appear in the widget, but all other members' values will.

Watch this video to learn how to create input controls.

The time series chart has a built-in time filtering mechanism allowing users to change the time frame display in the chart.

In your time series chart, you can show the absolute value of a measure for any given data point, or you can show the relative percentage difference over time.

In addition, the relative difference can calculated from the first visible data point to all other visible data points. When the time frame is adjusted (moved, shrunk, or stretched), the relative differences are updated.

Component filters are used to filter data visualized in a component, and can be a single filter or a predefined filter like a ranking. You can right-click on a bar in a chart or a row in a table and choose Filter to limit the data.

In the following example, a filter is applied in the Discount, Gross Margin per Product chart to filter by one specific product.

In filtering by hyperlinks, you have the option to set filters to jump from one page to another, to a different story, or to an external website. For example, as shown in the following figure, you can set a filter to jump to a page in a story. If you select Apply Selected dimension as filter, your selected cell is passed as a filter value to the Link to specifications.

Linked analysis is similar to filtering by hyperlinks in that you can use one widget to filter others. The primary difference is that this functionality filters only the story where Linked Analysis is defined. In other words, you cannot link to another story or external web site.

Linked analysis is available when working on multiple widgets and a single model. Linked analysis can also be used for widgets from different models as long as the models are blended. Blending is covered in an upcoming lesson.

Watch this video to learn about how to configure and work with linked analysis options in SAP Analytics Cloud.

Advanced filtering allows you to create story and page filters based on multiple dimensions by defining a set of logical conditions.

The dimensions used in advanced filtering can be filtered by using AND or OR conditions. These conditions can be set to include or exclude the data that satisfies the filter conditions.

The following figure illustrates advanced filters defined to return United States data for all years and overseas data only for 2018.

For more information on advanced filtering, watch this video tutorial.

With cascading filters, selections you make to a filter affect related filters in the same story or page. For example, if you have both Country and Region filters on a page, and you change the Country filter value from All to Sweden, the Region filter updates to show only regions within Sweden. All other region names are hidden.

This cascading filter effect is applied by default. You can turn it off in the More Actions options for a specific filter or input control.