Expand to Level – Underexposed but helpful, new features in BI4.1

Today, in our continuing series of new functionality in Analysis edition for OLAP that may not share the spotlight with others, I would like to highlight the ability to quickly expand or collapse an entire hierarchy to a specific level in BI4.1.

Problem

You want to expand every member in a hierarchy down to a particular level, but you don’t want to have to laboriously click the ‘+’ icon beside every member to drill down each level.

Current (BI4.0)

In Analysis OLAP 4.0, you can either choose the laborious path and click all the ‘+’ icons, or you can use the “Show levels” feature. First you collapse your hierarchy to the root level, then use the “Show levels” feature to unselect all levels between the root level and the level you want to expand down to. You then click on the ‘+’ icon beside the root member and this will display all members at the desired level. You can now return to the “Show levels” feature and select all the previously unselected levels. This will add all the parent members between the root and the desired level. Great… but that is not an intuitive solution.

New

In BI4.1, we have added a new context menu option, “Expand to level”. Simply right-click on the hierarchy, choose “Expand to level” and in the sub-menu choose the desired level. The entire hierarchy will now expand to show all members down to the desired level… as shown in the image below. Easy!

Don’t forget, this is also a great way to quickly collapse a hierachy. In just two clicks you can collapse an expanded hierarchy up to any level.

Look out for other posts showcasing what’s new in Analysis edition for OLAP over the coming days.

Regards,

Ian