Current Year vs Previous Year - Explosion of Measures

[Anonymous]

Hi there

So I want to show values on a chart for current year and previous year. I don't have a problem getting this right, and set up measure called "Sales Current Year", "Sales Prior Year". My concern is that I have to do this for each value I have. So I might have Cost of Sales, GP, Qty etc etc. So basically you then get a pretty big explosion of measures.

Furthermore, if I then want to show cumulative amount, this leads to further permutions. Very soon I can end up with a huge number of fields eg:

Sales Value

Sales Value Current Year

Sales Value Prior Year

Sales Value Current Month

Sales Value Current Month Cumul

etc, etc

Am I missing something? Is there a more effective way of handling this?

Many thanks!

Regards

Chris

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous -

The issue is that you actually need all of those measures, so they must be created.

A couple of potential approaches:

1. You can organize your measures with Display folders.

2. If reducing the number of measures is a high priority, it is possible to re-use the same measure to display different metrics. To do this:

-Create an unrelated Parameter table which specifies which metric you are analyzing. For example, let's say you have only, Sales and Qty. You could filter on this parameter.

-Have a measure called Value, which calculates Sales or Qty depending on your selection. 

-Build other measures off of the base measure.

There are some potential issues with #2:

1. All values will have a shared formatting

2. Performance could suffer

3. The measure names will be less descriptive

Hope this helps,

Nathan

[Anonymous]

Hi Nathan

Much appreciated!

Regards

Chris