Strategy ONE

Create a Stand-Alone Metric

You can create and add metrics to a Strategy project to perform calculations on your business data. Use these metrics on reports, documents, and dashboards to analyze your data. You can

To create a metric, you must define the metric's formula, which consists of the following:

  • Function: The calculation applied to your business data, such as Sum or Count. Your metric may contain multiple functions.
  • Expression: The business data from your data source. The expression can contain business facts, attributes, or other metrics.

If you are creating multiple metrics and each metric uses the same basic calculation as part of its formula, you can save time by creating a base metric to perform the calculation. You can then define additional metrics based on the base metric instead of typing the same calculation multiple times.

For example, you want to create a Profit metric and a Profit Margin metric. You can create a Revenue metric which calculates Price x Quantity. You can then define the Profit metric as Revenue - Cost, and the Profit Margin metric as Profit/Revenue. If you decide to change how Revenue is calculated later on, you can make changes to the Revenue metric; all metrics defined using the Revenue metric, including Profit and Profit Margin, will be updated to reflect the change. You create base metrics using the same steps as you would use to create any other metric. When creating metrics using the base metric, you type the base metric as part of the metric formula.

The steps below show you how to create a basic metric by selecting objects and being guided through the process, using the Metric Function Editor. If you want to type the metric formula directly, or to create a metric that combines multiple metrics or contains custom expressions, see Metric Formula Editor.

For more background information about metrics, see:

Stand-Alone Vs. Derived Metrics

This topic discusses stand-alone metric objects. You can also create derived metrics within reports, dashboards, and documents. They are not saved as separate objects. See: 

High-Level Steps to Create a Metric

To create a metric, you select the function that calculates the data and the data. For more detailed instructions, including formatting and defining subtotals, see To Create a Metric below.

  1. Open the Workstation window.
  2. From the File menu, select New Metric.
  3. If you are connected to multiple environments or projects, select an environment and project. The Metric Editor dialog box opens.
  4. In the Functions pane on the left, select the function to calculate data.
  5. In the Function Editor on the right, search for the fact to use as the data. While the object is usually a metric, it can also be a fact or an attribute.
  6. Save the metric.

To Create a Metric

  1. Open the Workstation window.
  2. From the File menu, select New Metric.
  3. If you are connected to multiple environments or projects, select an environment and project. The Metric Editor dialog box opens.
  4. In the Functions pane on the left, select the function to use to calculate data in the metric. You can narrow the list of functions displayed in the pane by doing one of the following:
    • To search for the function by name, type the function's name in the search field.

    • Choose a function category from the drop-down list, such as Math Functions or Financial Functions. The pane is updated to include only the functions that belong to the selected category.

    When you select a function, a description of the function is displayed at the bottom of the dialog box. Click Details to view more information about the function, such as syntax and examples.

  5. The Function Editor opens on the right side, with different options available depending on the type of function you selected above:

    • If you selected a grouping function, such as Sum, Average, First, or Maximum, you define the metric's expression, as well as optional components such as the level, condition, and transformation.

    • If you selected a non-grouping function, such as data mining, date, OLAP, and ranking functions, options to define the function's input values (called arguments) display. Any parameters that determine the function's behavior also display. For example, the NTile function has two parameters, Ascending and Tiles. Ascending controls whether the NTiles are ordered in ascending or descending order, while Tiles sets the number of splits. To view a list of the arguments and parameters for the function, click Details at the bottom of the dialog box. Hover your cursor over an argument or a parameter to display a tooltip description.

  6. You can define how the metric header and the metric values are formatted and displayed in a report. For example, you can define how numeric values are displayed, font styles and sizes, and cell display colors. Your formatting is applied to the metric regardless of the report on which it is placed. For steps to format the metric, see Format Metric dialog box.
  7. You can select the functions that can be used to total the metric on a report. See Advanced Metric Options dialog box.
  8. You can select the function used for the rollup of metric values that occurs when an attribute is moved from the report grid to the Report Objects in a report. For steps to set the dynamic aggregation function, see Advanced Metric Options dialog box.
  9. Click Save.

Once you have created a metric, you can add the metric to a report, document, or dashboard to analyze your data. For steps, see Create and Edit Reports.

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