In some reports you may hover over a cell or value or even see displayed in tabular reports places where an asterisk (*) is used for the value. Such instances are known as multiple attribute values and occur because the presentation of the column relative to the row displayed - either as a single discrete value or as an aggregate - has multiple values associated on that column.
In tabular reports we expect there to be one value per column per row - otherwise known as a cell. When there are multiple values associated with the same column in a single row, there is no native way to correctly associate or show all the relevant multiple values. In place of this, Insight will use an asterisk. This is largely caused by filters getting individual records with an identifier that returns multiple instances of the unique identifier.
For example, if we had a table like this:
| Person | Liked Color |
| Steve | Green |
| Ron | Red |
| Steve | Blue |
If we were to create a tabular report in which we were able to filter on both the Person and their Liked Color(s), we'd get the following results if our visualized table showed us the results in nesting order of Person then Liked Color:
Filtering on Liked Color is NOT Blue
| Person | Liked Color |
| Steve | Green |
| Ron | Red |
Filtering on Name is Ron
| Person | Liked Color |
| Ron | Red |
Filtering on Name is Steve or filtering on Liked Color is Green or Blue
| Person | Liked Color |
| Steve | * |
This occurs because Insight's tabular reports will not list the same unique leftmost column multiple times as you may encounter if querying directly from a database or taking in raw rows from Excel. However, as we can see above, when we filter the data such that multiple attribute values don't occur, we get a single fully defined row as we'd normally expect. This is because with the filters in place, the other rows that would cause multiple attribute values to occur are not considered and for the sake of presentation/rendering, it does not exist.
You might be thinking, "Why can't Insight just do something like 'Green, Blue' when there are multiple attribute values on the same topmost nesting column?" It's a fair suggestion, but if the values themselves in any arbitrary such column were to contain commas the formatting would be unpleasant. Because such attribute columns tend to be textual, we can't make any assumptions on what sort of delimiting character would work and keep a list of alternatives. Therefore, keeping parity of the resulting rows in the tabular report (or if a column is used as an attribute somewhere) with an * value is the cleanest way to inform you there are multiple values tied to the nesting group the individual row encapsulates.
We take care to try to avoid multiple attribute values from occurring by laying out tabular report columns such that they form unique value combinations. However, we cannot control or intervene on your account to correct instances where an Extension's number might be duplicated or an Extension's description is used multiple times. We recommend taking steps to ensure uniqueness of ID fields such as Extension Number in NocTel Talk and not re-using Agent IDs in NocTel Flow, as a few examples.