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NocTel Insight's tabular reports look a lot like Excel or spreadsheet applications present. However, NocTel Insight is smarter in that it wants to implicitly group data together - this is done based on the order of columns in a report. For This relative implicit grouping is performed from left to right making the leftmost column the overarching super group meaning it should be the broadest column with the fewest unique values. For example, consider a report that has the following unique columns: ID, Hire Date, Departure Date, Salary, Person, and Department. If you were to lay out a tabular report in NocTel Insight ordering these columns specifically in the order of Department, Salary, Person, ID, Hire Date, Departure Date then if you sorted on Salary, the sort would be performed relative to Department. Suppose we had the following data:
If you performed that sort descending by Salary you would end up with the following result:
Not the order you'd normally expect in Excel, but it occurred because NocTel Insight implicitly groups like values within columns and forms bucket subgroups. This means the salary sort was performed relative to each unique grouping of Department and did not agnostically look at the overall data in the set. Whereas Excel is happy to take any arbitrary column and sort everything relative just to that column, NocTel Insight does not have the same sort of looseness. This is much less of a problem in visual reports since plots like bars are actually an aggregation of something that's been visually bucketed. For example, revenues would be plotted in blue, operating expenses in orange, and profit margin in green. Sorting simply on "order all the values of the data set by revenue descending" is not a very useful action since it emphasizes just the revenue column and doesn't give a clear relationship to the other columns in the same row or at large. If you were to take the following data and try to sort it in the same way, you would end up the exact same result:
Why? Because Department is our leftmost column that all the other columns are expected to be relative to (e.g.: Salary relative to Department) having unique values for each Department across all our rows means the subgroups NocTel Insight creates all consist of just one row. A bucket of a single row is already technically sorted. If you require sorting on tabular data we recommend you perform an export to Excel (Crosstab) and perform the desired sorting there. |
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