Managing group options

The group options dialog allows you to manage how groups are collated and sorted. To open the Group Options dialog box, follow these steps:

1. Select the group you want to manage in the Data tab of the object definition dialog.
2. Press the Group Options button.
    

Once the Group Options dialog is open, you can change the group you are managing by selecting the appropriate value in the Group dialog box.
 

Managing how groups displayed

For multi-series charts, such as line charts or column charts, you can select whether a group is a category or a graph. A category is used to build the groups that are plotted along the main axis (usually the x axis). A graph is display as a separate element in the chart, for instance a separate line or column.

Managing how groups are collated

The Group Selection tab in the Group Options window allows you control how group values are collated. This can change the number and value of the groups created. If your group value is a date, or date-time value, you can choose which time interval is used to create your group. Follow these steps to define data and date-time groups:

Select the time interval you want the group to be created from.
 

Often, there may be too many group values to fit comfortably on the chart, and you may only be interested in the groups that have either the largest or smallest values. To resolve this, you can limit the number of group value using one of the group limiting options. The table below describes each of these group limiting options:

To apply one of the group filtering options, follow these steps:

1. Select one of the group limiting option (top n, bottom n, top percentage, bottom percentage)
2. Select the summary column that will be used as the value to determine the top or bottom values.
3. Enter a value for the number of groups (N) or percentage.
4. If you want to include all other groups summarised into a single group on the chart, select Include Others and enter a label for the extra group.
5. If you want to include ties, select the include ties option. For instance, if you select top N, where N is 5, and the values of group 5 and 6 are identical, the chart will include 6 groups.
    

Managing the sort order of Groups

The Group Sorting tab in the Group Options window allows you to define the order in which the groups are shown in the dashboard object. You can sort each group based on the group value, or one of the summary values. Follow these steps to define the sort order:

1. First, select which column the group sorting is going to be based on. This may be the same column that the group itself is based on, or a summary column.

1. Select how you want the sort column value to be applied to sort the group. The options are described in the table below:

Once you have defined a specified order, you can change the order by dragging the columns up or down in the list.