Answering Questions about Data

Filters are an integral part of almost every report. Filters screen the data that the report brings back from your data source. To successfully interpret the data displayed in a report, it is important to understand what data was specifically included in that report, as well as what data was excluded. This chapter shows you how to view a report filter's definition, and provides examples for simple and more complex filters. See Filtering data.

Drilling is one of the most powerful data analysis functionalities in any reporting environment. Drilling lets you explore data beyond the data immediately visible on a report. You can drill through a report to analyze data that is closely related to the original report data, or you can expose an entirely different object on a report to see what the data looks like within a different context. See Drilling into related data.

Drilling successfully on data in a report requires that you understand how business attributes in a reporting project can relate to each other within higher-level business concepts called hierarchies. Hierarchies and drilling are covered in this chapter. See Understanding hierarchies.