Sneak: How to do Advanced List Ordering

The Tips&Tricks Series is produced by the Customer Success Team. It highlights several easy to follow instructions and range from simple tasks to more advanced use cases.

How to do advanced list ordering with switches

This tip works hand in hand with switches, however if you want to use this outside of switches then it’s a great way to get consistent ordering on a defined set. In some cases your Discover report may need to jump between multiple measures displayed over the same visual. Often this needs to be ordered in some way, commonly descending based on the measure that is currently being used. If you have used a measure switch then you cannot natively order due to the fact that you cannot define the measure you are using until you run the visual.

1. In this example is a simple tornado chart looking at sales by manufacturer and used a switch to jump between different measures (sales or margin). Specifically it is in descending order and the Discover report has used Sales to create that ordering.

   

2. Now look what happens when switching the measure to margin—it has used the Sales ordering vs the margin measure which usually does not make sense.

   

3. To get around this, use an ordered list in formulate based on the dimension. Open formulate, choose list, and choose the dimension you want to order and order it using one of the sort options by one of the measures in your switch. Repeat as needed for all measures.

   

4. Lastly build a switch (found in formulate’s list options) and use the same parameter used in your measure switch. Add your dimensional ordered lists to this switch.

   

5. Replace the dimension used in Discover with this new ordered switch list.
   As you are using the same parameter to drive the switches, now they will power not only the value being visualised but the order of the dimensional members.
   When you use your switches in discover then it will change not only the measure, but dimensional values too, though please remember to remove and ordering predefined on the dimension from your discover.
   Here you can see the same screen shot as before but its ordered by the margin not the sales value.

   

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